Doubling of the Operational Lifetime of Portable Video Communication Devices Using Power-Rate-Distortion Analysis and Control

We consider a portable video device which captures and compresses video data. Video compression is computationally intensive and energy-consuming. However, the portable device, powered with batteries, has limited energy supply for data processing. One of the central challenging issues in portable video communication system design is how to maximize the operational lifetime. Based on our previous work on power-rate-distortion (P-R-D) analysis, in this work, we study how we could trade "bits" for "jouls" (energy) to minimize the energy consumption of video compression using optimum bit allocation. Our results, both theoretically and experimentally, show that using the proposed P-R-D video encoding technology, the operational lifetime of the portable device can be doubled or even tripled. This has a significant impact in energy-efficient portable video communication system design.