Energy Efficient VVC Decoding on Mobile Platform

Recently, global demand for high-resolution videos and new multimedia applications have created the need for a new video coding standard. Hence, in July 2020 the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was released providing up to 40% bit-rate saving for the same video quality compared to its predecessor High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). However, this bit-rate saving comes at the cost of high computational complexity, particularly for live applications and on resource-constraint embedded devices. This paper presents an power-efficient VVC decoder implementation designed for low-resource platforms. This latter exploits optimization techniques such as data level parallelism using Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions and functional level parallelism using frame, tile and slice-based parallelisms. The results showed that the OpenVVC decoder achieve real-time decoding of Full High Definition (FHD) resolution at 30 fps targeting a platform with 8 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.2 Ghz and High Definition (HD) real-time decoding at 30 fps for platforms using 4 cores with a maximum frequency of 1.8 Ghz. In terms of average consumed power, OpenVVC showed around 5.6 watts and 1.7 watts for the 8 and 4 cores platforms, respectively. In addition, it comes with the best trade-off between what is achievable in real-time and the power consumed in comparison to the state-of-the-art implementation.