Reconfigurable bit-stream parser

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel method to describe the bit stream syntax and parsing of video coding. Multiple codecs are being increasingly used in many applications, so flexible and efficient design of multiple codecs in a chip is becoming a very important issue. In MPEG, a standardization activity called reconfigurable video coding (RVC) addresses the reconfigurable design of video codecs based on functional units drawn from the existing MPEG codecs. In the RVC framework, reconfigurable bitstream syntax and its parsing play an important role in allowing new requirements, such as reconfigurable syntax manipulation and bitstream level transcoding, to be posed in multi-codec environments. In this paper, we propose a compact decoder description language (CDDL) to efficiently represent the syntax parsing of bitstreams in a compact manner. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through bitstream conformance testing, bitstream manipulation, and compactness evaluation of the parser description.