MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding: From specification to a reconfigurable implementation

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to produce automatic, reconfigurable, and portable implementations of multimedia decoders onto platforms with the help of the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard. MPEG RVC is a new formalism standardized by the MPEG consortium used to specify multimedia decoders. It produces visual representations of decoder reference software, with the help of graphs that connect several coding tools from MPEG standards. The approach developed in this paper draws on Dataflow Process Networks to produce a Minimal and Canonical Representation (MCR) of MPEG RVC specifications. The MCR makes it possible to form automatic and reconfigurable implementations of decoders which can match any actual platforms. The contribution is demonstrated on one case study where a generic decoder need to process a multimedia content with the help of the RVC specification of the decoder required to process it. The overall approach is tested on two decoders from MPEG, namely MPEG-4 part 2 Simple Profile and MPEG-4 part 10 Constrained Baseline Profile. The results validate the following benefits on the MCR of decoders: compact representation, low overhead induced by its compilation, reconfiguration and multi-core abilities.