Adaptive Color Selection to Limit Power Consumption for Multi-Object GUI Applications in OLED-Based Mobile Devices

Recently, as OLED displays are widely used in smartphones, their power management has become an important issue. Since OLED display devices show a large difference in power consumption depending on the colors used, proper color selection is important to reduce power consumption, but this may affect quality-of-experience (QoE) perceived by users. To address this tradeoff, this paper proposes a new power management scheme for graphical-user-interface (GUI) applications in OLED-based mobile devices. First, we examine the relationship between power consumption and color usage based on actual measurements and derive a model to express color preferences. Next, we present a dynamic programming algorithm that adaptively changes the color of the GUI objects in the applications to limit the total power consumption while effectively reflecting the color preferences of the user. The proposed scheme was implemented on a commercial smartphone, and real power measurements were conducted to examine whether it uses the given energy budget accurately under various color preference configurations. Experimental results show that color preferences significantly affect both power consumption and QoE, thereby demonstrating that personalized color selection plays an important role in reducing total power consumption of an OLED smartphone.