Displays based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology are appearing on many mobile devices. Unlike liquid crystal displays (LCD), OLED displays consume dramatically different power for showing different colors. In particular, OLED displays are inefficient for showing bright colors. This has made them undesirable for mobile devices because much of the web content is of bright colors. To tackle this problem, we present Chameleon, a color adaptive web browser that renders web pages with power-optimized color schemes under user-supplied constraints. Here are some examples of transformed web pages.

These examples are two web pages from ESPN and Facebook. Besides the original version, we also list the transformed versions using the following algorithms:
(1) Dark: Lightness of all the colors is uniformly reduced.
(2) Green: Lightness of each of the RGB channel is reduced separately. Green channel is reduced least because green is the most efficient color.
(3) Arbitrary: Lightness and chrome of each color are changed to minimize the display power consumption .
(4) Inversion: All the colors are inverted by replacing each of the RGB components with its complement.

Chameleon applies color transformation to web contents with the following features. It applies consistent color transformations to web pages from the same web site and applies different perceptual constraints in color transformations for web content of different fidelity requirements. Chameleon constructs the power model of an OLED display without external assistance in order to achieve device-specific optimal color transformation. It allows end users to set their color and fidelity preferences in color transformation. Finally, Chameleon only performs the absolutely necessary tasks in real-time and aggressively optimizes the real-time tasks for efficiency.

We have implemented Chameleon on Fennec, the mobile version of Mozilla Firefox. Our evaluation shows that Chameleon can reduce the average system power consumption during web browsing by 41% without introducing any user noticeable delay on OLED smartphones.

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Revision History:

01/30/2011: Overview, Usage, and Documentation description updated.

01/13/2011: Download link fixed; revision history added.

01/01/2011: Website released.