MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding

Abstract

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.

Methodologies for Synthesizing and Analyzing Dynamic Dataflow Programs in Heterogeneous Systems for Edge Computing

“…Dataflow programs are considered to be highly analyzable and platform independent [29]- [31]. In fact, dataflow computation models explicitly expose the potential parallelism of an application and provide the basis for developing extensive and systematic implementation analysis methodologies [30], [31]. For these interesting features, they are often considered as an alternative to the classical sequential programming methods particularly when targeting manymulticore processing systems.…”

“…For these interesting features, they are often considered as an alternative to the classical sequential programming methods particularly when targeting manymulticore processing systems. The features of dataflow computation models have been recently an objective of several research works [7], [30]- [35].…”

StreamDrive: a Dynamic Dataflow Framework for Clustered Embedded Architectures

“…In order to support dynamic dataflow execution, several research leverage on CAL programming language [14,15], and its ISO-standardized subset, RVC-CAL [31,32]. The RVC-CAL provides a dataflow framework with high level of abstraction and modularity as a basis for platform independent description of dataflow programs for execution on multicore platforms.…”

On the Development and Optimization of HEVC Video Decoders Using High-Level Dataflow Modeling

“…The MPEG-RVC framework [2] is an ISO/IEC standard conceived to address these needs. It is essentially constituted by the RVC-CAL actor dataflow language [3] and a network language, and aims at replacing the traditional monolithic standard specification of video codecs with a dataflow specification that better satisfies the implementation challenges.…”