Quality-Enhanced OLED Power Savings on Mobile Devices

In the future, mobile systems will increasingly feature more advanced organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays. The power consumption of these displays is highly dependent on the image content. However, existing OLED power-saving techniques either change the visual experience of users or degrade the visual quality of images in exchange for a reduction in the power consumption. Some techniques attempt to enhance the image quality by employing a compound objective function. In this article, we present a win-win scheme that always enhances the image quality while simultaneously reducing the power consumption. We define metrics to assess the benefits and cost for potential image enhancement and power reduction. We then introduce algorithms that ensure the transformation of images into their quality-enhanced power-saving versions. Next, the win-win scheme is extended to process videos at a justifiable computational cost. All the proposed algorithms are shown to possess the win-win property without assuming accurate OLED power models. Finally, the proposed scheme is realized through a practical camera application and a video camcorder on mobile devices. The results of experiments conducted on a commercial tablet with a popular image database and on a smartphone with real-world videos are very encouraging and provide valuable insights for future research and practices.