Power-Aware HEVC Compression Through Asymmetric JPEG XS Frame Buffer Compression

Willème, Alexandre [UCL] Macq, Benoît [UCL] Descampe, Antonin [UCL] Gaël Rouvroy [Intopix]

With the emergence of UHD video, reference frame buffers (FBs) inside HEVC-like encoder and decoder chips have to sustain huge bandwidth. The power consumption due to the accesses to these off-chip memories accounts for a significant share of the codec's total consumption. This paper describes a JPEG XS-based frame buffer compression solution intended to decrease the FB's bandwidth, making HEVC more suitable for use in power-aware applications. As opposed to previous works, our solution compresses large picture areas (ranging from a CTU to a frame stripe) independently and is suitable for use in several data reuse strategies. According to experimental results, this work provides significant off-chip bandwidth and memory size reduction (DRR) at the cost of a slight rate increase. In particular, at low rates and if FBC is applied at HEVC encoder only, the DRR is as high as 83.3% with a <4% rate increase and <0.12dB quality drop on average.