MPEG reconfigurable video coding

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 CAL for the specification of the standard library and the instantiation of the RVC decoder model. CAL 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 buildingthe standard RVC framework and the non-standard tools supporting the RVC model from the instantiation and simulation of the CAL model to the software and/or hardware code synthesis.