Power modeling of graphical user interfaces on OLED displays

Emerging organic light emitting diode (OLED) based displays obviate external lighting; and consume drastically different power when displaying different colors, due to their emissive nature. This creates a pressing need for OLED display power models for system energy management, optimization as well as energy efficient GUI design, given the display content or even the graphical user interface (GUI) code. In this work, we present a comprehensive treatment of power modeling of OLED displays, providing models that estimate power consumption based on pixel, image, and code, respectively. These models feature various tradeoffs between computation efficiency and accuracy so that they can be employed in different layers of a mobile system. We validate the proposed models using a commercial QVGA OLED module. For example, our statistical learning-based image-level model reduces computation by 1600 times while keeping the error below 10%, compared to the more accurate pixel-level model.