  In this paper, we show that processor events like instruction counts or cache
misses can be used to accurately estimate the processing energy of software
video decoders. Therefore, we perform energy measurements on an ARM-based
evaluation platform and count processor level events using a dedicated
profiling software. Measurements are performed for various codecs and decoder
implementations to prove the general viability of our observations. Using the
estimation method proposed in this paper, the true decoding energy for various
recent video coding standards including HEVC and VP9 can be estimated with a
mean estimation error that is smaller than 6%.
