Reconfigurable video coding: a stream programming approach to the specification of new video coding standards

Jörn W. Janneck (1) , Marco Mattavelli (2) , Mickael Raulet (3) , Matthieu Wipliez (4)

1 Xilinx Inc.
2 EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
3 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique
4 IETR - Institut d'Electronique et de Télécommunications de Rennes

Current video coding standards, and their reference implementations, are architected as large monolithic and sequential algorithms, in spite of the considerable overlap of functionality between standards, and the fact that they are frequently implemented on highly parallel computing platforms. The former leads to unnecessary complexity in the standardization process, while the latter implies that implementations have to be rebuilt from the ground up to reflect the parallel nature of the target. The upcoming Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard currently developed at MPEG attempts to address these issues by building a framework that supports the construction of video standards as libraries of coding tools. These libraries can be incrementally updated and extended, and the tools in them can be aggregated to form complete codecs using a streaming (or dataflow) programming model, which preserves the inherent parallelism of the coding algorithm. This paper presents the RVC framework and its underlying data flow programming model, along with the tool support and initial results.

Mots clés: dataflow programming; motion picture expert group; reconfigurable video coding

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués

Jörn W. Janneck, Marco Mattavelli, Mickael Raulet, Matthieu Wipliez. Reconfigurable video coding: a stream programming approach to the specification of new video coding standards. Proceedings of the first annual ACM SIGMM conference on Multimedia systems, 2010, New York, NY, USA, United States. pp.223--234, ⟨10.1145/1730836.1730864⟩. ⟨hal-00560032⟩