Template-Based Semi-Automatic Profiling of Multimedia Applications

Modern multimedia applications possess a very dynamic use of the memory hierarchy depending on the actual input, therefore requiring run-time profiling techniques to enable optimizations. Because they can contain hundreds of thousands of lines of complex object-oriented specifications, this constitutes a tedious time-consuming task since the addition of profile code is usually performed manually. In this paper, we present a high-level library-based approach for profiling both statically and dynamically defined variables using templates in C++. Our results in the visual texture coder of the MPEG-4 standard show that using the information it provides, we can easily achieve 70.56% energy savings and 19.22% memory access reduction.