E-Cube: Event Enhanced Efficient Video Streaming for Drones

This paper presents E-Cube, a framework designed to enhance the efficiency of mobile video streaming systems. Our core insight is that content correlations among frames, which are critical for video streaming but challenging to extract in dynamic scenes, are often already available as intermediate outputs from other mobile computing subsystems. By adopting a cross-subsystem design, E-Cube repurposes these intermediate results obtained from event cameras to reduce computation, energy consumption, and bandwidth usage of existing video streaming systems, while simultaneously improving video quality. We implement E-Cube on a drone-embedded chip through software-hardware co-design, and plugged E-Cube into three prevalent drone video streaming systems for industrial inspection. Evaluations in one of the world's largest oil fields and on public datasets demonstrate E-Cube can save over 35% network bandwidth overhead and reduce drone video streaming energy consumption by over 12% for H.265 and AV1, and 47% for advanced H.266, all while achieving improved video quality.