Reconfigurable Video Coding — a Stream Programming Approach to the Specification of New Video Coding Standards

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 imple- mentations have to be rebuilt from the ground up to reflect the parallel nature of the target. The upcoming Recongurable 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 data flow) programming model, which preserves the inherent parallelism of the coding algo- rithm. This paper presents the RVC framework and its underlying data flow programming model, along with the tool support and initial results.