Estimating the HEVC decoding energy using high-level video features

This paper shows how the decoding energy of HEVC software decoders can be estimated when using high-level features of a coded bit stream. The investigated features comprise number of frames, resolution, bitrate, QP, and encoder configuration, where the proposed model reaches an average estimation error of 10%. While establishing this model, we closely investigated the influence of these high-level features on the decoding energy. Mathematical relations are derived that can, e.g., be exploited to control the decoding energy from the encoder side. To show the validity of our research, evaluations are performed on two different hardware devices and three different software solutions.