The Human Visual System (HVS), with its intricate sophistication, is capable of achieving ultra-compact information compression for visual signals. This remarkable ability is coupled with high generalization capability and energy efficiency. By contrast, the state-of-the-art Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard achieves a compression ratio of around 1,000 times for raw visual data. This notable disparity motivates the research community to draw inspiration to effectively handle the immense volume of visual data in a green way. Therefore, this paper provides a survey of how visual data can be efficiently represented for green multimedia, in particular when the ultimate task is knowledge extraction instead of visual signal reconstruction. We introduce recent research efforts that promote green, sustainable, and efficient multimedia in this field. Moreover, we discuss how the deep understanding of the HVS can benefit the research community, and envision the development of future green multimedia technologies.

翻译：人类视觉系统（HVS）凭借其精密的复杂性，能够实现对视觉信号的超紧凑信息压缩。这一卓越能力兼具高泛化性与高能效。相比之下，当前最先进的多功能视频编码（VVC）标准对原始视觉数据实现的压缩比约为1000倍。这一显著差距激励研究界从中汲取灵感，以绿色方式高效处理海量视觉数据。因此，本文系统综述了如何为绿色多媒体实现视觉数据的高效表示，尤其当最终任务是知识提取而非视觉信号重建时。我们介绍了该领域近期推动绿色、可持续、高效多媒体的研究成果。此外，我们探讨了对HVS的深入理解如何惠及研究界，并对未来绿色多媒体技术的发展进行了展望。