SHF: Small: Turning Visual Noise into Hardware Efficiency: Viewer-Aware Energy-Quality Adaptive Mobile Video Storage

诸如智能电话的移动的设备正越来越多地用于观看视频，因为它们可以在任何时间任何地点方便地用于该目的，诸如在地铁或火车上通勤、坐在候车室中或在家闲逛。由于数据量大且计算密集，视频处理需要频繁的存储器访问，这会消耗大量电力，从而限制电池寿命并使移动的用户感到沮丧。一方面，存储器设计人员专注于硬件级功耗优化技术，而不考虑硬件性能如何影响观众的实际体验。另一方面，人类视觉系统在其检测图像质量的细微降级的能力方面受到限制;例如，在高环境照明的条件下，诸如在阳光直射的室外，遮蔽亮度（即，眩光）可以有效地掩盖图像中的缺陷，使得在这些情况下，可以以低于全质量的质量呈现视频，而观看者不能检测到任何差异。由于过于悲观的设计裕度，硬件设计和观众体验之间的这种隔离显著增加了硬件实现开销。该项目集成了观众感知和硬件自适应，以实现功率优化，而不会降低视频质量，如用户所感知的。该项目的结果将影响硬件设计和人类视觉的基础研究，并提供来自人类受试者的关键观众感知数据，这些数据可用于设计更好的视频渲染，以增加移动的设备的电池寿命。该项目将直接涉及本科生和研究生，包括女性和美洲原住民，在跨学科的研究。开发观众感知的移动的视频存储器解决方案已被证明是非常具有挑战性的问题，这是由于（i）复杂的现有观众体验模型;（ii）没有运行时适配的存储器模块;以及（iii）硬件设计者的观众体验分析的困难。该项目通过以下方式解决了这个问题：（i）关注影响观众体验的最有影响力的观看环境因素-环境亮度;（ii）提出自适应硬件设计的新方法;以及（iii）整合研究人员的专业知识，从心理学到集成电路设计和嵌入式系统。具体而言，该项目将（i）通过实验和数学方法将观众体验、环境照度和存储器性能联系起来;（ii）开发能量质量自适应硬件，可以根据环境亮度调整存储器使用，从而在不影响观众体验的情况下降低功耗;以及（iii）设计一个移动的视频系统，以充分评估所开发方法的有效性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被视为通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，

Mobile devices, such as smart phones, are being increasingly utilized for watching videos, since they can be conveniently used for this purpose anywhere anytime, such as commuting on a subway or train, sitting in a waiting room, or lounging at home. Due to the large data size and intensive computation, video processing requires frequent memory access that consumes a large amount of power, limiting battery life and frustrating mobile users. On one hand, memory designers are focusing on hardware-level power-optimization techniques without considering how hardware performance influences viewers' actual experience. On the other hand, the human visual system is limited in its ability to detect subtle degradations in image quality; for example, under conditions of high ambient illumination, such as outdoors in direct sunlight, the veiling luminance (i.e., glare) on the screen of a mobile device can effectively mask imperfections in the image, so that under these circumstances a video can be rendered in lower than full quality without the viewer being able to detect any difference. This isolation between hardware design and viewer experience significantly increases hardware implementation overhead due to overly pessimistic design margins. This project integrates viewer-awareness and hardware adaptation to achieve power optimization without degrading video quality, as perceived by users. The results of this project will impact both basic research on hardware design and human vision, and provide critical viewer awareness data from human subjects, which can be used to engineer better video rendering for increased battery life on mobile devices. The project will directly involve undergraduate and graduate students, including females and Native Americans, in interdisciplinary research. Developing a viewer-aware mobile video-memory solution has proven to be a very challenging problem due to (i) complex existing viewer-experience models; (ii) memory modules without runtime adaptation; and (iii) the difficulty of viewer-experience analysis for hardware designers. This project addresses the problem by (i) focusing on the most influential viewing-context factor impacting viewer experience - ambient luminance; (ii) proposing novel methodologies for adaptive hardware design; and (iii) integrating a unique combination of expertise from the investigators, ranging from psychology to Integrated Circuit design and embedded systems. Specifically, this project will (i) experimentally and mathematically connect viewer experience, ambient illuminance, and memory performance; (ii) develop energy-quality adaptive hardware that can adjust memory usage based on ambient luminance so as to reduce power usage without impacting viewer experience; and (iii) design a mobile video system to fully evaluate the effectiveness of the developed methodologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.