Pîrvan Daniel, 343C5

Uţă Iulia-Alexandra, 343C5

Towards Battery-Free HD Video Streaming

Saman Naderiparizi Mehrdad Hessar Vamsi Talla Shyamnath Gollakota Joshua R Smith
University of Washington University of Washington University of Washington University of Washington University of Washington
 1. INTRODUCTION
Why would you need low-power wearable cameras? There
has been recent interest in wearable cameras like the Snap
Spectacles for applications like life casting, video blogging
and live streaming concerts, political events and surgeries.
Being worn by a user in the form of glasses, it is imperiously
necessary that these cameras be lightweight, comfortable and
not prone to overheating: this makes battery size and life span
the most important factors to consider.
Video streaming is an extremely power-hungry operation.
The existing approaches optimize the camera module and the
communication system individually to somewhat reduce the
power consumption. This however, does not take into
consideration the issues coming from a lower level: the use
of video codec algorithms and analog-digital converters is still
required in such approaches, and they are very power-
intensive.
2. THE SOLUTION
Naderiparizi et al. have developed a novel architecture that
enables HD video streaming from a low-power wearable
camera to a nearby mobile device. They have eliminated the
need for power-hungry ADCs and codecs by introducing an
analog video backscatter technique that transmits analog pixels
from photo-diodes directly to the backscatter antenna.
The signal used in the backscatter link resembles that used
in an extremely power-efficient biological nervous system,
which translates data in spikes that are continuous in time but
constant in amplitude. This has led to as much as 10,000x
lower power consumption than it is norm for existing video
streaming services.
This technology enables battery-free HD video streaming,
with RF (radio frequency) harvested energy being sufficient to
power 1080p video streaming at 30fps up to distances of 8 feet
from the reader.
3. SYSTEM DESIGN
With the ADC removed from the camera, it is up to the
reader to convert the camera sensor’s analog output into the
digital domain. It does this by using pulse width modulation
(PWM). A PWM converter can be implemented with passive
RC components and a comparator, thereby consuming very
low power.
The reader is also designed to use ASIC (Application-
specific integrated circuit), which integrates the image sensor,
PWM converter, digital core, oscillator and backscatter
modulator onto a small silicon chip. This ensures maximum
optimization for low power usage, avoiding the pitfalls off
components such as FPGAs which are designed for flexibility
and ease of use, with little to no consideration for power
consumption.
To further optimize the solution, compression is used to
eliminate redundancies. Redundancy in video streaming can
take two forms: intra-frame redundancy and inter-frame
redundancy.
Intra-frame redundancy is induced by unnecessary pixel
values, and it is very high in uncompressed videos. It occurs
because, normally, video frames contain objects larger than a
single pixel, thus, little to no variation in color is present in
neighboring pixels. Big variations in pixel values occur mostly
at the borders of the objects depicted in-frame. With this
observation in mind, the solution uses a zigzag pixel scanning
technique in order to transmit analog video. This technique
ensures the resulting signal gets rid of information from
neighboring pixels, thus occupying less bandwidth. Tests have
shown that a 30 fps 720p video achieves up to a 71×
improvement compared to raw digital video transmission.
Inter-frame redundancy in raw videos is also significant,
and it happens between consecutive video frames. This
redundancy is eliminated by the inter-frame compression
functionality, which is split between the camera and the reader.
The camera mostly transmits low resolution frames (L frames),
comprised of „super-pixels” (a super pixel corresponds to a
block of pixels, and it contains the average value of the pixels
in that block). The reader compares the incoming low-res
frame with the previous one: if at least one super-pixel has
changed sufficiently between frames, the reader asks the
camera to send the full resolution frame (I frames); If the
difference between frames passes below the treshold, the
reader reconstructs a full-res picture based on the received
pixel values. A Full-resolution frame is also sent periodically
by the camera to the reader in order to cleanse artifacts and
errors that may accumulate over time.
4. IMPLEMENTATION
Two hardware prototypes have been built for this paper:
one for the high definition (HD) version and the other for the
low-resolution version of the camera.
The low resolution version uses a 112 × 112 grayscale
random pixel access camera taken from CentEye. This
provides access to individual analog pixel values.
For the HD version, a real implementation has been
deemed impossible. As no HD camera on the market gives
access to raw analog pixel values, the camera module proposed
by this solution cannot be truly implemented yet. To overcome
this, the HD camera has been emulated using a laptop that
transmits 1 minute long HD YouTube videos to a DAC (digital
to analog convertor) through a USB interface. The analog
convertor simulates the voltage levels an HD camera sensor
would provide.
The reader is implemented on the X-300 USRP software-
defined radio platform by Ettus Research. It uses a bi-static
radar configuration with two antennas, one used as a
transmitter and the other one as a receiver.
5. EVALUATION
The following evaluations have been conducted for the
proposed solution:
A. Operating range
The purpose of this evaluation is to label the video quality
according to the distance between the wireless camera and the
reader. To accomplish this, the distance was increased from 4
to 16 feet, and the camera was configured to repeatedly
transmit a 15-second video using PWM backscatter
communication. Thus, noise (SNR) was measured and the
effective number of bits reaching the reader (ENOB) was
calculated.
Following the evaluation, it was found that at a distance of
less than 6 feet, an ENOB of more than 7 was obtained,
indicating a negligible video quality degradation. The higher
the distance, the higher the noise, the ENOB drops, so the
video quality decreases more and more. However, a distance
of 16 feet is enough for a wearable wireless camera because it
can transmit video streams to a nearby mobile device, and the
video quality is not degraded too much.
B. Head position and movement
To make this evaluation, the participant wore the antenna
of the wireless camera and made different head movements.
He was at 5 feet away from the reader, whose position was
always a fixed one. The movements analyzed were: sitting
straight, moving his head to the left and right, turning his head
to one side, moving his head up and down, talking.
In this case, the noise and the effective number of bits were
measured and it was found that, as a result of these
movements, the video quality is higher than the original
quality of the video.
C. Extracting RF signals
The purpose of this assessment is to study the feasibility of
developing a battery-free HD camera that works by extracting
the RF signals transmitted by the reader.
It has been observed that at a distance of 4 and 6 feet there
will be enough amount of available energy from RF extraction
in order to operate the wireless camera at a resolution of
1080p. At higher distances, the power is reduced, which will
lead to a decrease in resolution. At a distance of 16 feet, the
resolution will reach 480p; beyond this distance, the power
obtained by extracting RF energy is not enough to continue to
supply the wireless camera.
D. Distributed inter-frames compression
Two videos were used in this test: an HD video transmitted
by a fixed monitoring camera and another one transmitted by a
camera mounted on a person riding a motorcycle.
The compromise between the compression ratio and the
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) for different compression
rates is obtained by changing the threshold at which we
consider the super pixel to have changed significantly (from
20 to 20 pixels).
It has been observed that, for static cameras, a
compression rate of at least 35x is achieved, maintaining a
PSNR of over 30 dB. For dynamic cameras, the compression
ratio will be 2x for a PSNR of more than 30 dB.
6. SECURITY CAMERA WITH LOWER RESOLUTION
Because wireless cameras are increasingly popular in
security and smart home applications, the previously
exemplified design has been expanded to have lower resolution
(enough for applications such as face detection) but to operate
at longer distances. Thus, the camera can detect people's faces,
and this system can also set an alarm when an intruder is
detected. The distance you can operate is up to 100 feet away
from the reader, and the accuracy is 95%.
7. RELATED WORK
A. Backscatter Communication
The first backscatter devices were spy devices [1]; they
were used for listening in, using a resonant cavity. The human
voice moved the diaphragm to shape the cavity resonance
frequency, which could be detected by analyzing the RF
signals reflected by the cavity.
All backscatter systems were microphone models, none of
them used video streams. Moreover, they had a low rate of
audio data transmitted. Thus, the wearable wireless camera is
the first video backscatter system.
Additionally, this wireless camera sends 4 times more
video data than audio data transmitted by existing audio
backscatter systems.
B. Low-power cameras
The first example [2] is a camera whose photodiodes
can switch between power extraction and photo capture mode.
One disadvantage of this system is that it is not a wireless one.
Later, the low-resolution wireless cameras [3, 4, 5, 6]
appeared, but they could not transmit video streams: they could
send a new frame at every 10 seconds (when the distance from
the RF power source is about a foot) or once in a few tens of
minutes (when the distance is greater).
A low-power system [7] replaced a regular camera because
the regular one limited the operating time to less than 2 hours.
However, the battery-free wearable camera optimized the
power savings by eliminating ADCs and amplifiers.
8. CONCLUSIONS
This solution does not take security into account, but in
order to secure the link between the reader and the wireless
camera, each camera could use a security key, which is known
only by the reader. The pixel sent by the camera will be
encoded using this random generated key and decoded by the
reader.
The use of ASIC instead of off-the-shelf devices ensures
maximum optimization in regards to power consumption, as
multi-purpose devices like FPGAs often overlook this aspect.
In order to use a smartphone as a reader, the mobile device
needs to support a backscatter reader or a RFID reader [8],
which can be plugged into the headjack.

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