Power-aware bandwidth and stereo-image scalable audio decoding

Abstract

We propose a new workload-scalable audio decoding scheme that would enable users to control the tradeoff between playback quality and power consumption in battery-powered portable audio players. Our objective is to give users a control at the decoder side, similar to the Long Play (LP) recording mode at the encoder side in many media recording devices. The main contribution of this paper is a proposal for a Bandwidth and Stereo-image Scalable (BSS) decoding scheme for single-layer audio formats such as MP3. The proposed scheme is based on an analysis of the perceptual relevance of different audio components in the compressed bitstream. The bandwidth and stereo-image scalability directly translates into scalability in terms of the computational workload generated by the decoder. This can be exploited by a voltage/frequency scalable processor to save energy and prolong the battery life. Copyright © 2005 ACM.