Digital Signal Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding
Marco Mattavelli, Mickael Raulet, and J orn W. Janneck
Abstract
Traditional efforts in standardizing video coding used to involve a
lengthy process that resulted in large monolithic standards and reference codes.
This approach has become increasingly ill-suited to the dynamics and the fast
changing needs of the video coding community. Most importantly, there used to
be no principled approach to leveraging the significant commonalities between
the different codecs, neither at the level of the specification nor at the level of
the implementation. The result is a long interval between the time a new idea is
validated and the time it is implemented in consumer products as part of a worldwide
standard. The analysis of this problem was the starting point of a new standard
initiative within the ISO/IEC MPEG committee, called Reconfigurable Video
Coding (RVC). The main idea is to develop a video coding standard that overcomes
many shortcomings of the current standardization and specification process by
updating and progressively incrementing a modular library of components. As the
name implies, flexibility and reconfigurability are new attractive features of the
RVC standard. The RVC framework is based on the usage of a new actor/dataflow
oriented language called C
AL
for the specification of the standard library and the
instantiation of the RVC decoder model. C
AL
dataflow models expose the intrinsic
concurrency of the algorithms by employing the notions of actor programming and
dataflow. This chapter gives an overview of the concepts and technologies building
M. Mattavelli
SCI-STI-MM Lab, EPFL, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
e-mail:
marco.mattavelli@epfl.ch
M. Raulet (
)
IETR/INSA Rennes, F-35043, Rennes, France
e-mail:
mickael.raulet@insa-rennes.fr
J.W. Janneck
Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Sweden
e-mail:
jwj@cs.lth.se
