MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding - Signal Processing Systems - page 276

the standard RVC framework and the non-standard tools supporting the RVC model
from the instantiation and simulation of the C AL model to the software and/or
hardware code synthesis.

1 Introduction

A large number of successful MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) video coding
standards has been developed since the first MPEG-1 standard in 1988 [ 12 ] .
The standardization efforts in the field, besides having as first objective to guarantee
the interoperability of compression systems, have also aimed at providing appropri-
ate forms of specifications for wide and easy deployment. While video standards
are becoming increasingly complex, and they take ever longer to be produced, this
makes it difficult for standards bodies to produce timely specifications that address
the need to the market at any given point in time. The structure of past standards
has been one of a monolithic specification together with a fixed set of profiles
that subset the functionality and capabilities of the complete standard. Similar
comments apply to the reference code, which in more recent standards has become
normative itself. Video devices are typically supporting a single profile of a specific
standard, or a small set of profiles. They have therefore only very limited adaptivity
to the video content, or to environmental factors (bandwidth availability, quality
requirements).
Within the ISO/IEC MPEG committee, Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC)
[ 5 , 28 , 43 ] standard is intended to address the two following issues: make standards
faster to produce, and permit video devices based on those standards to exhibit
more flexibility with respect to the coding technology used for the video content.
The key idea is to standardize a library of video coding components, instead of
an entire video decoder. The standard can then evolve flexibly by incrementally
extending that library, and video devices can configure themselves to support a
variety of coding algorithms by composing encoders and decoders from that library
of predefined coding modules.
This chapter gives an overview of the concepts and technologies building the
standard RVC framework and can complement and be complemented by the
following chapters of this handbook [ 11 , 36 , 42 ] .

2 Requirements and Rationale of the MPEG RVC

Framework

Started in 2004, the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) framework [ 5 ] is
a new ISO standard (Fig. 1 ) aiming at providing an alternative form of video codec
specifications by standardizing a library of modular dataflow components instead of
monolithic sequential algorithms. RVC provides the new form of specification by