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

SHF：小：将视觉噪声转化为硬件效率：观看者感知的能源质量自适应移动视频存储

• 批准号: 1815430
• 负责人: Na Gong
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: North Dakota State University Fargo
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-10-01 至 2018-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1815430&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Turning; Visual; Noise

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.

智能手机等移动设备越来越多地用于观看视频，因为它们可以随时随地方便地用于观看视频，例如乘坐地铁或火车、坐在候诊室或在家闲逛。由于数据量大、计算密集，视频处理需要频繁的内存访问，这会消耗大量电量，限制电池寿命，让移动用户感到沮丧。一方面，内存设计者专注于硬件级功耗优化技术，而没有考虑硬件性能如何影响观看者的实际体验。另一方面，人类视觉系统检测图像质量细微下降的能力有限；例如，在环境光照较高的情况下，例如在室外阳光直射的情况下，移动设备屏幕上的遮光亮度（即眩光）可以有效掩盖图像中的缺陷，从而在这种情况下可以渲染视频低于完整质量，观看者无法察觉任何差异。由于过于悲观的设计余量，硬件设计和观看者体验之间的这种隔离显着增加了硬件实现开销。该项目集成了观看者感知和硬件适应，以实现功率优化，而不会降低用户感知的视频质量。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看者意识数据，这些数据可用于设计更好的视频渲染，以延长移动设备的电池寿命。该项目将直接让本科生和研究生（包括女性和美洲原住民）参与跨学科研究。事实证明，开发观众感知的移动视频内存解决方案是一个非常具有挑战性的问题，因为（i）现有的观众体验模型复杂； (ii) 没有运行时适配的存储器模块； (iii) 硬件设计人员进行观看体验分析的难度。该项目通过以下方式解决该问题：(i) 关注影响观看者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； (iii) 整合研究人员的专业知识的独特组合，范围从心理学到集成电路设计和嵌入式系统。具体来说，该项目将 (i) 通过实验和数学方式将观看者体验、环境照度和内存性能联系起来； (ii) 开发能源质量自适应硬件，可以根据环境亮度调整内存使用量，从而在不影响观看体验的情况下减少功耗； (iii) 设计一个移动视频系统，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，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。