MPEG reconfigurable video coding

The current monolithic and lengthy scheme behind the standardization and the design of new video coding standards is becoming inappropriate to satisfy the dynamism and changing needs of the video coding community. Such a scheme and specification formalism do not enable designers to exploit the clear commonalities between the different codecs, neither at the level of the specification nor at the level of the implementation. Such a problem is one of the main reasons for the typical long time interval elapsing between the time a new idea is validated until it is implemented in consumer products as part of a worldwide standard. The analysis of this problem originated 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 building the 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.