The currentmonolithic 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.

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MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding

Video coding technology has evolved in the past years into a variety of different and complex algorithms. So far the specification of such standard algorithms has been done case by case providing monolithic textual and reference SW specifications, but without any attention on commonalities and the possibility of incremental improvements or modifications of such monolithic standards. The MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) framework is a new ISO standard, currently under development aiming at providing video codec specifications at the level of library functions instead of monolithic algorithms. The possibility to select a subset of standard coding algorithms to specify a decoder that satisfies application specific constraints is very attractive. However, such possibility to reconfigure codecs requires systematic procedures and tools capable of describing the new bitstream syntaxes of such new codecs. Moreover, it is also necessary to generate the associated parsers which are capable to parse the new bitstreams because they are not available ldquoa priorirdquo in the RVC library. This paper further explains the problem and describes the technologies used to describe new bitstream syntaxes within RVC. In addition, the paper describes the methodology and the tools for the validation of bitstream syntaxes descriptions as well as an example of systematic procedures for the direct synthesis of parsers in the same data flow formalism in which the RVC library component are implemented.

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Validation of bitstream syntax and synthesis of parsers in the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding framework

The standardization efforts of MPEG in video coding, originally had as main ­objective to guarantee interoperability of compression systems. This carried with it the possibility to reach another important objective, namely to wide and easy deployment of implementations of those standards. While at the beginning MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 were only specified by textual descriptions, with the increasing complexity of video coding tools, starting with the MPEG-4 set of standards, C or C++ specifications, called reference software, have also become a formal specification of the standards. However, descriptions composed of non-optimized non-modular software packages have shown limitations. Since in practice they are frequently the starting point of an implementation, system designers must rewrite these software packages not only to try to optimize performance, but also to transform such specifications into appropriate forms adapted to be the starting point of current system design flows.

MPEG Reconfigurable Video Representation

Video coding technology has evolved in the past years into a variety of different and complex algorithms. So far the specifications of such standard algorithms have been done case by case, providing monolithic textual and reference software specifications, but without paying any attention to the possibility of further improvements of such monolithic standards. The MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) framework is a new ISO/IEC standard, currently under its final stage of development aiming at providing video codec specifications at the level of coding tools instead of monolithic descriptions. The possibility to select a subset of standard video coding algorithms to specify a decoder that satisfies application specific constraints is very attractive. However, such possibility to reconfigure codecs requires systematic procedures and tools capable of describing the new bitstream syntaxes of such new codecs. Moreover, it becomes also necessary to generate the associated parsers, capable of parsing the new bitstreams. This paper further explains the problem and describes the technologies used to describe new bitstream syntaxes. Additionally, the paper describes the methodologies and the tools for the validation of bitstream syntaxes descriptions as well as a systematic procedure for automatically synthesizing parsers from the bitstream descriptions.

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Automatic Synthesis of Parsers and Validation of Bitstreams Within the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding Framework

The study of embodied communication requires access to multiple data sources such as multistream video and audio, various derived and meta-data such as gesture, head, posture, facial expression and gaze information. This thesis presents the data collection, annotation, and analysis for multiple participants engaged in planning meetings. In support of the analysis tasks, this thesis presents the multimedia Visualization for Situated Temporal Analysis for Macintosh (MacVisSTA) system. It supports the analysis of multimodal human communication through the use of video, audio, speech transcriptions, and gesture and head orientation data. The system uses a multiple linked representation strategy in which different representations are linked by the current time focus. MacVisSTA supports analysis of the synchronized data at varying timescales for coarse-to-fine observational studies. The hybrid architecture may be extended through plugins. Finally, this effort has resulted in encoding of behavioral and language data, enabling collaborative research and embodying it with the aid of, and interface to, a database management system.

MacVisSTA: A System for Multimodal Analysis of Human Communication and Interaction

Developing the code to parse and generate multimedia bitstreams has traditionally been a repetitive and error-prone task. It has also been an area of application development that defied the goal of software reuse. In contrast, BSDL abstracts the minutiae of bitstream parsing out of software code, into an interoperable data file (the BSDL schema), allowing developers to concentrate on the functionality of their particular application. BSDL's approach has demonstrated applications at numerous points in the multimedia delivery chain. In the future, this approach may be extended to still other processing tasks, such as transcoding and transmoding, or to types of binary data other than multimedia

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A.I. Joseph

Papers

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? A Universal Metalanguage for Multimedia