1. Introduction

The unremittingly increasing user demands and expectations have fueled the gigantic growth for advanced multimedia services in mobile devices (i.e., embedded multimedia systems). This led to the emergence of high-performance image/video signal processing in such mobile devices that are inherently constrained with limited power/energy availability. On the one hand, advanced multimedia services resulted in the evolution of new multimedia standards with adaptive processing while providing high quality, increased video resolutions, increased user-interactivity, etc. As a result, the next generation applications executing on the embedded multimedia systems exhibit high complexity and consume high energy to fulfill the end-user requirements. On the other hand, the battery capacity in mobile devices is increasing at a significantly slow rate, thus posing serious challenges on the realization of next-generation (highly-complex) multimedia standards on embedded devices. Further parameters that affect the design of an embedded multimedia system are long device charging cycles, cost, short time to market, mass volume production, etc. Besides these constraints and parameters, the intense market competition has created a multi-dimensional pressure on the industry/research to provide innovative hardware/software architectures for high-performance embedded multimedia systems with low power/energy consumption. Due to the context-aware processing in the emerging multimedia standards, the need for user-interactivity, and frequent product upgrades (in a short-time-to-market business model) have introduced a new dimension of run-time adaptivity to the overall requirements of the emerging embedded multimedia systems in order to react to the run-time changing scenarios (e.g., quality and performance constraints, changing battery levels).