SPORT: Spherical-PSNR-Optimized tRuncaTion for Power-Efficient 360-Degree Video Systems
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.