Principal Investigator Vivienne Sze
Project Website http://www.rle.mit.edu/eems/
The Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group aims to develop and implement energy-efficient and high-performance systems for various multimedia applications such as video coding/processing, imaging and vision. We focus on joint design of algorithms, architectures, circuits and systems to enable optimal tradeoffs between power, speed and quality of result. Accordingly, our work traverses various levels of abstraction from energy-aware algorithm development for signal processing to efficient architecture design and low-power VLSI circuit implementation.
Computer vision, which automatically extracts information from visual data (e.g., object detection, recognition, etc.), promises to enable revolutionary technologies such as wearable vision for the blind, self-driving cars, drone navigation, robotics, etc. In many of these applications, local processing near the image sensor, rather than in the cloud, is desirable due to latency, security/privacy, and communication bandwidth concerns. However, computer vision algorithms tend to be computationally complex, making local processing difficult as the amount of energy available is limited by battery capacity.
The Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group aims to drastically reduce the energy consumption of real-time visual data processing so that computer vision can fully realize its potential in a wide range of embedded vision applications. To meet these demands, our group develops energy-efficient design techniques crossing the traditional research boundaries between signal processing algorithms and hardware (including circuits, architectures and systems).
Current research topics(*) Energy-Efficient Computer Vision(*) Next-Generation Video Coding