SPORT: Spherical-PSNR-Optimized tRuncaTion for Power-Efficient 360-Degree Video Systems
For VR system designers, SPORT provides a practical method to reduce memory power (30-40% of total headset power) without compromising perceived quality, validated on fabricated silicon.
SPORT reduces memory power consumption in VR headsets by truncating bits of pixels outside the user's field of view, achieving 47.9-51.6% power savings and bandwidth reduction while maintaining high visual quality (WS-PSNR thresholds met, SSIM=1.000 in attended region).
Memory bandwidth accounts for 30-40% of total power consumption in standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets, yet existing systems typically store the entire 360-degree frame at a uniform resolution regardless of viewer gaze. This paper presents SPORT (Spherical-PSNR Optimized tRuncaTion), a bit-truncation framework that reduces display-path memory power by storing only the most significant bits of pixels outside the user's field of view (FoV). Specifically, a new bit-truncation framework is developed to use weighted-to-spherically-uniform PSNR (WS-PSNR) directly in the optimization constraint, eliminating the metric inconsistency that arises when standard PSNR is used for a WS-PSNR quality target. Also, gaze-predictive tile classification compensates for the 9.33 ms end-to-end pipeline latency, reducing boundary misclassifications by 5.2 percentage points at a cost of only 0.01 ms. In addition, the developed SPORT-B variant, which keeps the FoV lossless, achieves 47.9% memory power saving and 47.9% bandwidth reduction across different 4K video sequences while satisfying all three per-region WS-PSNR thresholds and maintaining SSIM = 1.000 in the attended region. The full adaptive variant SPORT-A reaches 51.6% power saving, 3.1percentage points more than a PSNR-based optimizer at equal measured quality. SPORT is validated on the TrunMEM360 flexible SRAM Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) fabricated in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS, confirming byte-exact silicon-software agreement, with WS-PSNR and SSIM matching within 0.1 dB and 0.001. CACTI-based analysis confirms 48.72% DRAM leakage reduction and 36.4%/36.7% read/write energy reduction. The total motion-to-photon latency of 9.33 ms satisfies the 20 ms VR comfort budget with a 53.3% safety margin.