de Lausanne (Switzerland)

Video coding technology has evolved in the past years into a variety of different and complex algorithms. So far the spec-ification of such standard algorithms has been done case by case providing monolithic textual and reference SW specifi-cations, 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 specifi-cations at the level of library functions instead of monolithic algorithms. The possibility to select a subset of standard cod-ing algorithms to specify a decoder that satisfies application specific constraints is very attractive. However, such possibil-ity 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 as-sociated parsers which are capable to parse the new bitstreams because they are not available “a priori ” 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. 1