310 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO.
2, FEBRUARY 2012
Energy-Aware Video Encoding for Image Quality
Improvement in Battery-Operated
Surveillance Camera
Younghoon Lee, Jungsoo Kim, Student Member, IEEE, and Chong-Min Kyung, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractGrowing needs for surveillance in locations without
power lines necessitates the development of a surveillance camera
with extremely low-power consumption and an assured stable
operation until the time of expected run-out of available energy.
This paper proposes an algorithm for scheduling of video en-
coding configurations in a battery-operated surveillance system to
reduce the image distortion while assuring the sustained operation
until the battery recharge/exchange. The optimal video encoding
configuration is determined based on the amount of estimated
remaining event duration (considering the uncertainty of events)
and remaining battery charge (considering the rate-capacity and
recovery effect). The proposed algorithm consists of two steps:
design-time step and run-time step. In the design-time step, pre-
diction of remaining event duration, called duration prediction,
is performed considering the uncertainty of events and tradeoff
between encoding power and image quality. During run-time,
video encoding configuration is switched between intra-frame
encoding and inter-frame encoding based on the duration pre-
diction obtained in design-time step and the remaining battery
charge measured in run-time step. Compared to the conventional
method based on the most conservative duration prediction [5],
experimental results show that the proposed method provides
2.24~3.78 dB improvement in the image quality (in terms of peak
signal-to-noise ratio in the H.264 encoding of four video sequences
while satisfying the battery constraint.
Index TermsBattery, surveillance camera, uncertainty, video
encoding.
I. INTRODUCTION
T O MEET the growing demands on public security against
crimes, accidents, and disasters, it is necessary to enhance
monitoring functions in places even without power lines, which,
in turn, depends on the availability of battery-operated video
camera with very low cost and power consumption. In such
a battery-powered surveillance system, energy management
becomes a very critical issue. The primary requirement of such
surveillance system is to capture events of concern and inform
the relevant personnel before the battery runs out. To extend
Manuscript received April 09, 2010; revised July 17, 2010; accepted De-
cember 04, 2010. Date of publication January 24, 2011; date of current version
January 18, 2012. This work was supported by the National Research Foun-
dation of Korea (NRF) grant 2010-0000823 funded by the Korea government
(MEST).
Y. Lee is with the Software Platform Laboratory, LG Electronics, Seoul 137-
130, Republic of Korea (e-mail:lyh1064@gmail.com).
J. Kim and C.-M. Kyung are with the Department of Electrical Engineering,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305-
701, Republic of Korea (e-mail:jskim@vslab.kaist.ac.kr; kyung@ee.kaist.ac.
kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2102055
1063-8210/$26.00 2011 IEEE
the battery lifetime in the surveillance system until the battery
replacement, it needs to be operated in an event-driven manner,
i.e., the system captures events and encodes the images for
storage and/or transmission when and only when the event
is detected. However, duration and arrival time of an event
is generally assumed to be uncertain [1]. Such uncertainties
make it difficult to predict actual video encoding time and to
find the pareto-optimal (with respect to energy, distortion, and
rate, according to the system specification) video encoding
configuration. Conventional methods based on worst-case
scenario are likely to waste energy, because the estimation of
event duration is too conservative, i.e., each event is assumed
to have the longest possible value [5].
In smart surveillance systems, video encoding configura-
tion is selected among many encoding configurations with
different distortion and energy consumption levels. In video
encoding such as H.264 or MPEG4, the amount of distortion
of a compressed video can be represented as a function of the
amount of consumed energy when the bitrate [2] is constant.
In [2], a power-scalable video encoding method is proposed
to minimize the energy consumption in portable video com-
munication devices. Such complexity control parameters as
the number of sum of absolute difference (SAD) computations
and fraction of skipped macro blocks are adjusted to provide a
trade-off between the encoding complexity and the distortion
level. High encoding complexity generally leads to low video
distortion. On the other hand, in dynamic voltage and frequency
scaling (DVFS)-enabled systems, increasing the number of
frequency and voltage levels contributes to reduced energy
consumption. In video encoding of smart surveillance systems,
various complexity control parameters are adjusted to capture
all events until the next battery recharge/replacement while
maintaining the image distortion below a given level. When the
remaining battery charge is small, captured events are encoded
in a low-energy mode; otherwise high-energy mode is selected
leading to low-distortion level. Using this power-scalable
encoding method, we can schedule a sequence of encoding
configurations to minimize overall distortion under any given
battery charge constraints.
Battery is not an ideal energy source. The amount of energy
actually delivered to the load by battery depends not only on
the available charge in the battery but also on the discharge cur-
rent profile through the load. This is explained through the two
nonlinear characteristics of battery: rate-capacity effect and re-
covery effect. Rate-capacity effect represents the dependency of
the amount of energy delivered by a battery on the magnitude of
LEE et al.: ENERGY-AWARE VIDEO ENCODING FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN BATTERY-OPERATED SURVEILLANCE CAMERA
Fig. 1. Target architecture of the surveillance camera consisting of sensor, event detector, video encoder, and memory; we implemented the system using LG
XNOTE LW25 laptop such that event detector [16] and video encoder [17] as well as OS are running on Intel Core2Duo processor; the power of the system is
delivered from two batteries connected in parallel with voltage level conversion using a DC-DC converter [18].
discharge current. The recovery effect reflects the charge recov-
ered when the discharge current is sufficiently small. Due to the
nonlinear behavior of battery, the total charge loss of the battery
is generally different from the charge consumption by the load.
Analytical battery models have been proposed for the nonlinear
battery characteristics [9].
In this paper, we propose a scheme for determining the
video encoding configurations to minimize the image distortion
under the constraint of fixed time-to-battery replacement. The
proposed scheme considers the probabilistic characteristics of
events and performs the prediction of remaining event duration
called duration prediction which minimizes the total estimated
image distortion until the battery replacement while guaran-
teeing that the scheduled list of events is completed.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
reviews related works. Section III presents the system model
of our work. Section IV describes the problem definition and
overall flow. Section V explains the battery-aware distortion
minimization algorithm. Experiments results are given in
Section VI followed by the conclusion.
II. RELATED WORKS
Several methods have been proposed to maximize the overall
performance under energy constraints [3], [4] by switching
among multiple operation modes each with different amount
of energy consumption. [5] proposed reward maximization
algorithm while satisfying the energy constraint and real-time
constraint. Recently, [6] proposed an operation mode sched-
uling scheme to maximize the image quality considering
probabilistic task execution time under energy constraints, with
an assumption of fixed event arrival time.
A number of schemes have been proposed to reflect and ex-
ploit the probabilistic event characteristic in reducing the en-
ergy consumption. In [7], runtime distribution-aware DVFS al-
gorithm was proposed. This method analytically determines the
performance level to minimize the energy consumption on a
single processor. A heuristic DVFS algorithm was proposed for
obtaining the optimal remaining workload which provides the
minimal dynamic and leakage energy consumption [8]. How-
ever, none of these methods [3][8] have considered the non-
linear characteristics of battery.
311
Some battery models considering the nonlinear behavior of
battery [9], [10] predict the total charge loss of battery to esti-
mate the battery lifetime. Various battery-aware task scheduling
methods were proposed [11][15] using the analytical battery
model in [9] which reflects the rate-capacity and recovery ef-
fects of battery. In [11] and [12], static task scheduling methods
to maximize battery lifetime were described. In [13], effects
of inserting idle periods were described with general guide-
lines for choosing between battery-aware management policy
(considering the nonlinear battery characteristics) and energy-
aware management policy (without considering the nonlinear
battery characteristics). However, these methods only consider
the scheduling of tasks with fixed arrival time and duration.
This paper first proposes analytical energy management
scheme considering the two practically most important fea-
tures in the design and operation of energy-aware surveillance
camera systems, i.e., stochastic event characteristic and non-
linear battery behavior. To achieve this goal, we modeled the
stochastic event characteristics as a probability distribution
function (PDF), and then, present a scheme to scale video
encoding complexity considering the statistical information of
PDF and nonlinear battery behavior to obtain the best image
quality. The key contribution of this paper lies in extracting the
best video quality until the given timeline while exhausting the
battery charge based on the most realistic battery charge model.
III. SYSTEM MODEL
In this section, we first describe our target surveillance
camera system (see Section III-A). Then, we present a
model for power-quality relationship of video encoder (see
Section III-B) and a battery model considering the nonlinear
battery characteristics, i.e., rate-capacity and recovery effect
(see Section III-C).
A. Target System and Hardware Implementation
We targeted at a battery-operated surveillance camera system
which observes a specific location without moving. Fig. 1 il-
lustrates our target surveillance camera system consisting of
multiple functional blocks, i.e., sensor, event detector, video en-
coder, and memory. The main function of the system is to detect
suspicious objects in its camera scope, and then store the video
312 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012
in memory. To avoid energy being consumed for recording un-
critical events, our target system is operated in an event-driven
manner where all functional blocks, except for an event detector,
are normally power-gated and only wake up when an event is de-
tected by the event detector. Only when an event is detected by
an event detector, the image captured by a sensor is compressed
by a video encoder to be stored into a memory.
As shown in Fig. 1, we implemented the target system using
LG XNOTE LW25 laptop whose processor supports DVFS.1 We
implemented both of the event detector and the video encoder
as software running on the processor in the laptop. For the event
detector, we used background subtraction algorithm [16], which
can be implemented in very low complexity. We used x264 [17],
real-life software for H.264 encoder, as the video encoder whose
complexity is scaled according to encoding configuration, e.g.,
search range, I-frame insertion period, etc.
To reduce the power consumption of the processor using
DVFS, we implemented a power manager in OS such that pro-
cessor operating frequency is set as the ratio of the remaining
number of clock cycles to the time-to-deadline as follows:
(1)
where and represent the number of clock cycles for
evaluating the event occurrence and encoding a frame, respec-
tively. Since the frequency level is discrete, we set the frequency
at the lowest possible value, but not lower than the value calcu-
lated by (1) among the given set of discrete frequencies.
The power of the system is supplied from two Li-Ion bat-
teries connected in parallel for doubling battery capacity. Note
that parallel connection of batteries is a typical configuration of
battery to extend battery charge capacity where the number of
batteries connected in parallel, i.e., battery charge capacity, is
determined by the expected battery lifetime in a typical surveil-
lance system. A buck converter is used as a DC-DC converter in
order to match voltage levels between the output voltage of the
battery and the input voltage of the target system [18].
B. Power-Quality Model
A complexity-scalable video encoder can encode a video
sequence with disparate encoding configurations. Image quality
is generally improved as the complexity of video encoding
configuration increases, where the complexity is defined as
the average number of clock cycles to encode a frame [2].2
The increased complexity often leads to drastic increase in
power consumption, especially in a DVFS-enabled system.
Video encoding complexity can be controlled by adjusting
various encoding parameters such as frame type (I/P/B-frame
representing intra/predictive/bi-directional predictive frame),
motion estimation scheme, and search range. In this work,
instantaneous decoding refresh (IDR) period, i.e., number of
1In
a battery-operated surveillance camera system, DVFS is the most
powerful and popular technique used to reduce the energy consumption. Intel
Core2Duo processor, which is used in our surveillance camera system for event
detector and video encoder, can save a significant amount of energy using
DVFS.
2There can be some exceptional cases, i.e., poorly designed algorithms where
the image quality deteriorates despite higher encoding complexity.
TABLE I
VIDEO ENCODING COMPLEXITY AND IMAGE QUALITY DATA ACCORDING TO
IDR PERIOD AS OBTAINED FOR H.264 ENCODING (BIT-RATE: 2000 kb/s,
2
FRAME-RATE: 15 fps, IMAGE: 1280 720 PEDESTRIAN [19])
P- or B-frames between two nearest I-frames, is chosen as the
only encoding parameter for simplicity.3 In general, I-frame
is associated with lower computational complexity and lower
image quality than P- or B-frame. Thus, with more I-frames
inserted during the event encoding, the complexity of the event
encoding becomes lower while the image quality deteriorates.
Table I shows the simulation result of the average per-frame
video encoding complexity and the average image quality
obtained by encoding 1280 720 Pedestrian video [19] for
various IDR periods. The first column shows the IDR period (in
terms of the number of frames). The second to fourth columns
represent the corresponding average image complexity (in 10
cycles, which is obtained by Performance Application Program-
ming Interface (PAPI) [20]), average power consumption (in
Watts), and the average image quality [in peak signal-to-noise
ratio (PSNR)], respectively. The power consumption is mea-
sured from thermal and power microarchitecture simulator
PTscalar [21] by configuring a target processor in PTscalar
as the best-effort estimate of the processor in LG XNOTE
LW25 laptop, i.e., Intel Core2Duo T7200 processor, using the
parameters presented in [22]. As shown in Table I, the image
quality as well as the encoding complexity and power increases
as IDR period increases.
Fig. 2 shows the relationship between image quality and
power consumption for the case of encoding 1280 720 Pedes-
trian video [19]. -axis and -axis represent image quality
(in PSNR), and the normalized encoding power consumption
with respect to the power consumption when IDR period is set
to 50 in Table I, respectively. Each dot in Fig. 2 represents a
pair of the normalized power consumption and image quality
obtained experimentally by varying the IDR period, which,
in turn, affects the power consumption through the change of
encoding complexity, as shown in Table I. We approximated
the relationship between the image quality and the normalized
power (solid line) through fitting the dots to the following form:
(2)
3Despite many other encoding parameters which can be used for controlling
the trade-off between the produced image quality and required energy, we se-
lected IDR period to show how remaining energy can be used to estimate the
optimal level of image quality in a very simplistic manner. Extension to other
parameters, e.g., motion vector search range, macro block mode selection, etc.,
should not be too difficult, but beyond the scope of this paper.
LEE et al.: ENERGY-AWARE VIDEO ENCODING FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN BATTERY-OPERATED SURVEILLANCE CAMERA 313

linear charge loss, [9]. represents the amount of

charge consumed by the load system until time . repre-
sents the amount of charge loss due to nonlinear battery charac-
teristics reflecting both rate-capacity and recovery effect at time
. can be expressed by quantizing the elapsed time into
time steps and approximating the current within a time step
as constant as follows:

(6)

with

(7)

Fig. 2. Relationship between image quality (PSNR) and normalized power
consumption with respect to the power consumption when IDR period equals
2
50, as obtained by fitting points in Table I into (2) for 1280 720 Pedestrian
[19].
where and represent the image quality (in PSNR) and the
normalized power consumption of the encoding condition, re-
spectively. , , and are curve fitting parameters deter-
mined by least-square fitting. In Pedestrian video, the average
(max.) fitting error becomes minimal, i.e., 1.21% (2.17%) when
, , and . Since the curve fitting
parameters are dependent on the video captured, more specifi-
cally, amount of motion contained in the video [2], we need to
find the curve fitting parameters at each video capture.
The power is supplied from a battery with voltage level con-
version using a DC-DC converter whose efficiency is defined
as follows:
(8)
where and represent, respectively, the required battery dis-
charge current and the elapsed time at , where
is the unit time step, and is a technical parameter depending
on the battery characteristics.
Cumulative nonlinear charge loss depends not only on the
active current profile but also on the idle period because of the
nonlinear charge recovery during the idle period [13]. Idle pe-
riod denotes the time interval between active periods, where ac-
tive period is defined as time interval during which current is dis-
charged from battery. As shown in (8), the cumulative nonlinear
charge loss, , increases as time passes within each active pe-
riod. Thus, the cumulative nonlinear charge loss becomes max-
imum at the end of each active period. We define cumulative
nonlinearity (having the dimension of time) at as
as follows:

(3) (9)

where and are the current and voltage of a processor,

respectively. and are the current discharged from a Cumulative nonlinearity represents the equivalent amount of
battery and battery output voltage, respectively. Assuming that time during which battery is assumed to be additionally dis-
and are constant at their nominal values,4 i.e., 3.6 V and charged due to nonlinear charge loss, which depends on the pat-
0.8 and using (3), in (2) can be expressed as a function of tern of active and idle periods. Fig. 3(a) shows the pattern of
as follows: active period and idle period while Fig. 3(b) shows the corre-
sponding cumulative nonlinearity. Each circle in Fig. 3(b) rep-
(4) resents peak cumulative nonlinearity (PCN) denoted as
for the th active period in the th region (region is defined in
where is a constant defined as Section IV). With longer active period, the PCN at the end of ac-
tive period becomes larger. Because idle period leads to charge
(5)
recovery, longer idle period generally tends to lower the cumu-
lative nonlinearity.
C. Battery Model
Total charge loss of battery until time , , is calculated IV. PROBLEM DEFINITION AND SOLUTION OVERVIEW
as the sum of actual charge loss, , and cumulative non- Battery recharge time (BRT) is assumed to be fixed in this
4Even though output voltage of Li-Ion battery, V
work. Fig. 4(a) exemplifies an event trace during a BRT which
, ranges 3.0~4.2 V ac-
cording to the remaining battery charge, we approximated that V is constant is divided into fixed time intervals, each of which is called re-
in order to reduce the solution complexity. As stated in [9], it is a reasonable gion. For instance, if BRT is fixed as one week and each region
assumption since the error in terms of estimated lifetime is less than 3%. In ad- is two hours long, the number of regions, , is 84 ( 24(hours/
dition, as presented in [18], the efficiency of DC-DC converter,  , is almost con-
stant throughout the entire range of load current in a recently presented DC-DC day)/2(hours) 7(days)). In this work, we assumed that an
converter by improving the efficiency in the range of light load current. event happens when suspicious objects are observed within a
314 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012
Fig. 3. (a) Battery discharge current profile within a region shown as an alter-
nating sequence of idle period and active period, each with varying duration.
(b) Time profile, within a region, of cumulative nonlinearity with each circle
denoting the PCN.
Fig. 4. Event trace divided into N fixed time intervals, each of which is called
region.
camera scope, making the sum of absolute difference (SAD)
between the captured image and background image larger than
a predefined threshold value, i.e., background subtraction [16].
Within each region, there is an alternating sequence of active
and idle periods as shown in Fig. 4(a). The amount of active pe-
riod, i.e., time duration of a single event is called event active
duration (EAD), while the total amount of EAD within a region,
which is calculated as the sum of EAD within a region, is called
regional active duration (RAD). The event sequence of the th
region is characterized with two stochastic parameters: 1) RAD
of the th region, denoted by and 2) probability distribution
function (pdf) of peak cumulative nonlinearity (PCN) of the th
region, denoted by . riod in Table I, and the battery discharge current versus the av-
Fig. 5 shows three types of input required in the proposed
procedure. Fig. 5(a) and (b) show, respectively, pdf of RAD and
PCN of the th region obtained from different event traces
during BRT. Since the event trace of the th region has a sto-
chastic temporal variation for each BRT, RAD, and PCN ob-
tained from different event traces during BRT can be repre-
sented by pdfs shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b), respectively. Note
that where is the probability
where corresponds to the th quantized level and is the
number of quantized level of . Fig. 5(c) shows the relation-
Fig. 5. Solution inputs: pdfs of (a) RAD and (b) PCN obtained from M dif-
ferent event traces during BRT, and (c) relationship of image quality (in PSNR)
with respect to battery discharge current.
Fig. 6. Runtime solution: battery discharge current level of each region is i
L
quantized into levels to obtain the corresponding IDR period as the video
encoding configuration.
ship of image quality (in PSNR) with respect to battery dis-
charge current in (4).
Based on the three inputs shown in Fig. 5, we determine
the scheduling of video encoding configuration (IDR period in
this work) to enhance the image quality under battery charge
constraint. The proposed solution consists of design-time step
and run-time step. In the design-time step, we find the optimal
duration prediction, ( ), for the th region such
that , average of predicted cumulative image quality from the
th region to the th region is maximized, where is defined
by
(10)
In (10), denotes the image quality (in PSNR) recorded during
the th region, which is a function of battery discharge current
during the th region, i.e., , as given in (4) and Fig. 5(c). is
the average of , the RAD of the th region. The probability
distribution of is shown in Fig. 5(a).
The runtime step of the proposed solution is shown in Fig. 6.
In runtime, we determine the video encoding configuration, i.e.,
IDR period in this work, at the start of each region based on
the duration prediction . The LUT translating the battery dis-
charge current level to the IDR period in Fig. 6 is built from the
relationship of the average power consumption versus IDR pe-
erage power consumption in (3). Once the video encoding con-
figuration is determined, it is maintained until the end of the re-
gion. There are video encoding configurations each of which
is mapped onto corresponding battery discharge current where
represents the battery discharge current of the th video en-
coding configuration. Thus, video encoding configuration of the
th region can be selected by determining the amount of battery
discharge current , which is calculated as follows:
(11)
LEE et al.: ENERGY-AWARE VIDEO ENCODING FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN BATTERY-OPERATED SURVEILLANCE CAMERA 315

where represents the amount of remaining charge measured
at the start of the th region. is the prediction of PCN of the
th region (which is set to the average of PCNs of the th region
in this work). Since represents the average nonlinear charge
loss during the th region, ( ) represents the amount of
average residual actual charge at the start of th region. Then,
we set so that the residual actual charge, i.e., ( ), can
be equally distributed in encoding the remaining events when
the prediction of total event duration is . By rearranging the
equation with respect to , we can express as shown in the
right-hand side of (11), i.e., ratio of the remaining battery charge
, to ( ) which is the effective remaining time reflecting
the nonlinearity effect. (In the ideal case with , is
determined as .)
In addition, to prevent the battery exhaustion before the end
of a BRT, we check, at the start of each region , whether
satisfies the following three constraints:
(12)
duration predictions for regions and checking inequalities
in (12)~(14) in running the proposed scheme is negligible
compared to other functions such as video encoding and event
detection.
V. BATTERY-AWARE DISTORTION MINIMIZATION
In this section, we describe a method to predict the dura-
tion to maximize the predicted cumulative image quality. In the
first case, we assume that the BRT is divided into only two re-
gions and the RAD in each region is fixed. We then consider
the second case where the RAD in each region has a pdf. In the
third case, whole BRT is divided into regions with the pdf of
RAD of each region.
A. Two Regions With RAD Given as Unit Function
When two regions are cascaded with RAD of each region
fixed, the predicted cumulative image quality metric covering
from the first to the second region, i.e., , can be defined and
calculated as follows:

(15)
(13) As presented in (11), the battery discharge current level and
can be expressed as follows:
(14)
(16)
We define a new operator which is used to represent
the maximum value of within the corresponding region, e.g.,
(17)
represents the maximum value of within the
th region. First constraint (12) implies that has to be set such
that the maximum charge consumed in the th region, i.e., sum where
of the actual and nonlinear charge loss when the total amount
of RAD becomes the largest, must be less than the amount of (18)
residual charge, i.e., , even in the worst case, to prevent the
system failure. The second constraint (13) requires that is set By replacing and with (16) and (17) and normalizing
so that the amount of residual charge at the start of the th region to one, we can rearrange (15) as follows:
must be larger than the sum of actual charge loss consumed by
the th region and the minimum amount of charge required to
encode remaining events occurring from ( )th to th region
in the lowest power mode, i.e., . The third constraint (14) (19)
represents the specified range of the current level. We calculate the optimal event duration in each region in the
If battery discharge current determined by (11) does not reverse order, i.e., , as presented in [7]. First, we de-
satisfy the constraints in inequalities (12)~(14), is adjusted to termine . Since the second region is the last region in this
the minimum value the th quantized battery current level case, we set as the worst-case RAD of the second region
which satisfies the constraints in inequalities (12)~(14). After to prevent battery exhaustion when the worst case actually hap-
is determined, we find corresponding video encoding configu- pens. Then, we find which maximizes in (19). Because
ration (i.e., IDR period, in this work) by accessing the pre-char- is set as the average peak cumulative nonlinearity (APCN) of
acterized LUT which stores the set of pairs (battery discharge each region, is a unit function in this case, and is already
current, IDR period) as shown in Fig. 6. determined to its worst-case RAD, is the only unknown vari-
The proposed solution causes hardware cost and power able in (19). In addition, is a concave function with respect to
consumption. In our proposed scheme, additional hardware is , thereby, we can obtain which maximizes by finding
required to store LUT for a set of pairs (battery discharge a point where . The point can efficiently be found
current, IDR period) shown in Fig. 6, and duration predictions using root-finding algorithm, e.g., bisection, NewtonRaphson
for regions found in design time. However, it is negligible method, etc.
since both and are usually set to small numbers ( and
in our experiment as mentioned in Section VI-A). The B. Two Regions With Probabilistic Distribution of RAD
amount of power consumed for finding proper video encoding When RAD of each region has a probabilistic distribution as
configuration, i.e., IDR period, by accessing the table storing shown in Fig. 5(a), the predicted cumulative image quality can
316 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012

be calculated as the sum of (19) with respect to pdfs of RAD is 0.8 [18]. We assumed that the battery recharge time (BRT)
of two regions, i.e., and , as follows: is 1000 min and is partitioned into 10 regions, thereby each re-
gion is 100 min ( 1000 min/10 regions) long. We applied the
proposed method in four different scenarios which are classified
according to event duration and occurrence:
1) Scenario 1: short-duration events occurring once in a
while (e.g., parking lot or road crossing at night);
2) scenario 2: short-duration events occurring frequently
(e.g., parking lot or road crossing in the daytime);
3) scenario 3: long-duration events occurring once in a while
(e.g., desert or public cemetery at night);
(20)
4) scenario 4: long-duration events occurring frequently
where is the number of quantized levels of RAD, i.e., . (e.g., desert or public cemetery in the daytime).
is the probability of fitting into the th quantized We compared the following three schemes, all of which ex-
level. denote when and fit into the th ploit nonlinear battery characteristics:
and th quantized levels, respectively. WORST [5]: duration prediction as the sum of the worst-
Because in (20) is also a concave function with respect to case RAD of all remaining regions;
, we can obtain the global maximum point, at a point, , AVERAGE: duration prediction as the sum of average
where . RAD of all remaining regions;
DIST (proposed): duration prediction with exploiting
C. Regions With Probabilistic Distribution of Event Active probabilistic RAD.
Duration We compared the effectiveness of each scheme with the
When BRT is partitioned into regions with RAD of each average of normalized measured cumulative image quality
region represented by a pdf, optimal duration prediction of the (in PSNR) with respect to the number of encoded frames (in
short, measured cumulative image quality), which is calculated
th region ( ) can be obtained by finding a point which max-
as (sum of image quality of all encoded frames)/(number of
imizes the predicted cumulative image quality from the th to
encoded frames). Since battery-unaware video encoding sched-
the th region, i.e., . is then calculated by summing ,
uling schemes lead to system failure due to battery exhaustion
using the pdf of RAD, from the th to the th region
before BRT is completed, it is unfair to compare the effective-
ness of battery-aware and battery-unaware methods. Therefore,
in our experiment, we compared the effectiveness (in terms
of measured cumulative image quality) of considering the
distribution of event characteristics only among battery-aware
video encoding configuration scheduling methods.

B. Quality Improvement
(21) Table II shows the comparison of the measured cumu-
lative image quality (in PSNR) and measured cumulative
is obtained first, followed by , , and so on, i.e.,
image distortion (in MSE) obtained by applying the three
the sequence of obtaining each is
methods for the above-mentioned four scenarios. Compared
.5
with WORST and AVERAGE, the proposed distribution-aware
method (DIST) gives 2.24~3.78 dB and 0.59~1.15 dB image
VI. EXPERIMENT
quality improvement, which correspond to 40.32%~58.12%
A. Setup and 12.76%~23.28% reduction of image distortion in terms
of image distortion (MSE), respectively. The reason for such
In our experiment, we used the target system presented in significant improvement can be analyzed with Fig. 7 which
Section III-A. We used nine IDR periods each of which cor- shows battery discharge current (first row), measured cumu-
responds to different encoding power consumption and image lative image quality (shown as PSNR in the second row) of
quality level as shown in Table I. We used the battery-related the encoded image until the corresponding time, and residual
parameters in [9], i.e., initial charge, , which equals to 40 375 charge (shown as distortion (MSE) in the third row) obtained
(mA-min) and in (6) (8). In our system, by applying WORST, AVERAGE, and DIST for the average
two batteries are connected in parallel while the battery and load case of Scenario 3, respectively.
system are connected by a dc-dc converter whose efficiency ( ) As shown in the first row of Fig. 7(a), battery discharge cur-
5The complexity to calculate (21) isOR N
( 1 ) where R and N represent rent is set relatively low at the start of BRT while it is mono-
the number of quantized levels of RAD and regions, respectively. However, tonically increasing as time goes on. Such an increasing battery
since it is calculated in design time as we mentioned in Section IV, the discharge current schedule comes from conservative duration
additional components required to be implemented in a target surveillance
camera system are additional memory space to store duration predictions, i.e., prediction of the WORST. Since WORST sets duration predic-
fD ;D ; ;D ... g, and a power manager shown in Fig. 1. tion as the sum of the worst-case RAD of remaining regions,
LEE et al.: ENERGY-AWARE VIDEO ENCODING FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN BATTERY-OPERATED SURVEILLANCE CAMERA 317

Fig. 7. Scheduling result for Scenario 3 where three rows represent battery discharge current (first row), corresponding normalized cumulative image quality
(second row), and residual charge (third row), respectively, obtained by applying: (a) WORST, (b) AVERAGE, and (c) DIST (proposed).

TABLE II
COMPARISON OF IMAGE QUALITY AND DISTORTION RESULTS

battery discharge current, which is inversely proportional to du-
ration prediction as in (11), is set too low owing to the over-
estimation of the remaining event duration. At the end of each
region, the amount of residual charge is larger than estimated
at the start of the region, because actual RAD is smaller than
the RAD based on the worst-case assumption. In the WORST
scheme, to utilize the excess residual charge to improve the en-
coded image quality, the battery discharge current of the next
region has to be increased. As a consequence, the measured cu-
mulative image quality also monotonically increases as shown
in the second row of Fig. 7(a). However, to satisfy the constraints
on battery discharge current to prevent battery exhaustion, i.e.,
(12) and (13), the excess residual charge cannot be fully uti-
lized as the amount of residual charge becomes smaller in later
regions, since high discharge current leads to large PCN which
lowers the battery discharge current to meet the battery charge
constraint. Thus, despite large excess residual charge in later re-
gions, battery discharge current cannot be set sufficiently high.
In case of AVERAGE shown in Fig. 7(b), battery discharge cur-
rent (the first row) is almost even during a BRT.
In contrast with WORST and AVERAGE, the proposed solu-
tion DIST sets battery discharge current in a decreasing fashion,
i.e., battery discharge current is set high in the beginning and
lowered as time goes on, as shown in Fig. 7(c). Since excess
residual charge cannot be fully utilized in later regions, we set
the discharge current sufficiently high and set the video en-
coding configuration accordingly to obtain high video quality,
in earlier regions where residual charge is much larger than
PCN. As a consequence, in later regions, battery discharge cur-
rent needs to be set lower than the other two methods due to
smaller residual charge. As the second row of Fig. 7(c) shows,
in earlier regions, measured cumulative image quality obtained
318 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 20, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012
by DIST is higher than others while it slightly decreases as
time goes on due to the decreasing battery discharge current
schedule in DIST. As shown in the third row in Fig. 7(a)(c),
the residual charge at the end of BRT of DIST is less than those
of others since DIST can efficiently utilize the battery charge by
exploiting the nonlinear battery characteristics.
VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed an analytical scheme for setting
video encoding configurations that exploits stochastic event
characteristics and nonlinear discharge behavior of battery in
a battery-powered surveillance camera system. The proposed
scheme predicts the remaining event active duration, which is
used to set IDR period, such that the average image quality is max-
imized under the given battery energy constraints. Experimental
results show that the proposed scheme yields 0.59~1.15 dB
and 2.24~3.78 dB improvement in the image quality (in terms
of PSNR) compared to average and worst-case prediction
schemes, respectively, while satisfying the battery constraint.
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Younghoon Lee received the B.S. degree in elec-
trical engineering from Korea University, Seoul,
Republic of Korea, in 2008, the M.S. degree from the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea,
in 2010.
He is currently with Software Platform Laboratory,
LG Electronics, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His re-
search interests include dynamic power management
and low power OS kernel design.
Jungsoo Kim (S06M11) received the B.S. degree
in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Insti-
tute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon,
Republic of Korea, in 2005, and the unified course
of the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
KAIST, in 2010.
He is currently with KAIST as a postdoc since
2010. His research interests include dynamic power
and thermal management, MPSoC design, and
low-power wireless surveillance system design.
Chong-Min Kyung (S76M81SM99F08)
received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering
from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in
1975, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Sci-
ence and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic
of Korea, in 1977 and 1981, respectively.
From April 1981 to January 1983, he worked as
a postdoc with Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray
Hill, NJ. He joined KAIST in 1983, where he has
been working on system-on-a-chip design and verifi-
cation methodology, processor, and graphics architectures for high-speed and/or
low-power applications including mobile video codec. He was a visiting Pro-
fessor with the University of Karsruhe in 1989, as an Alexander von Humboldt
Fellow, visiting Professor with the University of Tokyo from January 1985 to
February 1985, visiting Professor with the Technical University of Munich from
July 1994 to August 1994, at the Waseda University at Kyushu Campus from
2002 to 2005, University of Auckland, New Zealand from February 2004 to
February 2005, and Chuo University from July to August 2005. He is a Hynix
Chair Professor at the KAIST. He is Director of the Integrated Circuit Design
Education Center (IDEC) established in 1995 to promote the IC design educa-
tion in Korean universities through CAD environment setup and chip fabrication
services. He is Director of SoC Initiative for Ubiquity and Mobility (SoCium)
Research Center established to promote academia/industry collaboration in the
SoC design-related area.
Dr. Kyung was a recipient of the Most Excellent Design Award, and Spe-
cial Feature Award in the University Design Contest in the ASP-DAC 1997
and 1998, respectively, the Best Paper Awards in the 36th DAC held in New
Orleans, LA, the 10th International Conference on Signal Processing Applica-
tion and Technology (ICSPAT), Orlando, FL, in September 1999, and the 1999
International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), Austin, TX. In 2000,
he received the National Medal from the Korean Government for his contribu-
tion to research and education in IC design. From 1993 to 1994, he served as
Asian Representative in the International Conference on Computer-Aided De-
sign (ICCAD) executive committee. He was General Chair of Asian Solid-State
Circuits Conference (A-SSCC) 2007, and ASP-DAC 2008. He is a member of
National Academy of Engineering Korea (NAEK) and Korean Academy of Sci-
ence and Technology (KAST)..