EOS: Energy-Optimized Super-Resolution on Mobile Devices for Live 360-Degree Videos

Although on-device video super-resolution enables high-quality live 360-degree streaming on mobile devices, existing methods often waste energy by overlooking perceived visual quality. In this paper, we present EOS, an energy-efficient on-device super-resolution system for mobile omnidirectional video (ODV) live streaming. EOS reduces energy waste by dynamically adjusting super-resolution complexity based on the predicted visual quality of super-resolved frames. This approach raises two challenges: (1) designing an adaptive inference policy that maximizes energy savings while minimizing degradation in Quality-of-Experience (QoE), and (2) developing a method to predict visual quality under the constraints of mobile ODV live streaming. To tackle these challenges, EOS introduces EOS SR and a No-Reference Up-scaling Quality Prediction scheme. EOS SR employs a device-agnostic, scalable deep neural network optimized for mobile devices, with an energy-aware scheduler that jointly selects the optimal super-resolution model and GPU frequency. The No-Reference Upscaling Quality Prediction scheme estimates visual quality across arbitrary viewpoints in real time without requiring high-resolution reference videos. Experiments on commodity smartphones show that EOS reduces average power consumption by 34.6%–49.9% compared to baseline methods, while preserving high visual quality and frame rates.