Executive Summary

Mobile phones are taking up add-on Multimedia functionalities requiring long operation time. This includes watching TV (mobile TV), video recording and playing, video streaming and video phony. Uses of other portable multimedia devices are also becoming more and more common. Wireless video sensors and networks are still another emerging application of power aware coding. Broadband wireless networks are being considered for deployment in the field of defense, security, 3-D video reconstruction. Video coding has to be done on the video sensor nodes which are battery operated and are meant for long term field deployment. Low power and power aware video coding can provide extended operational duration to get the best services out of these applications. This calls upon investigating and developing low power and power-adaptive computational schemes like that for video coding which specifically is a very power hungry task. Developing Video codec software architectures that are power-adaptive is an emerging research area. This research will focus on this task and the specific objective of the project are:

1. To benchmark the shortcomings of existing video codec’s in meeting the customers expectation due to limited energy resources of the portable and mobile devices
2. To research on and develop (a proof-of-concept) low power and power-aware video codec for battery operated mobile and portable devices which can yield a longer battery life and is adaptive to the varying battery power level. It could be implement-able on low power DSPs (cores) as generally used in mobile devices.
3. To demonstrate its superiority in meeting the users expectations.

Benefits of the project of the project shall be seen in many fields including:

• Wireless video sensor networks with battery powered sensor node and mobile video surveillance applications will facilitate the defense and security sector.

• Telemedicine and NGOs can have longer availability of mobile multimedia services in remote areas.

The project will yield Video codec with power-aware features for multimedia applications with capability of handling real-time videos of sizes like CIF or QVGA and frame rates up to 30 frames/s. The project will bring forth a prototype multimedia application (like streaming/playback) on portable/mobile platform with integrated designed video codec.