Real-time testbed for MPEG-1 video compression
Christian Bouville, A. Bouriel, R. Brusq, P. Houlier · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
The MPEG-1 (ISO-11172) video compression standard allows considerable latitude in codec design in both aspects of processing algorithms and hardware. This flexibility is difficult to exploit because it implies hours of computer simulation to find a good compromise between the application requirements, the picture quality, and the hardware complexity. To cope with this problem, we have developed an MPEG-1 programmable coding testbed that allows real time experimentation of the coding process in a wide range of application profiles. The coder architecture is highly modular and consists of several processing units which communicate through high speed video data paths and low speed transputer links for control data. Each of these processing units has an MIMD architecture made up of a linear structure of processing modules. These processing modules combine transputers for the control tasks and DSPs for intensive computing tasks (or block matching accelerators for the motion estimation unit). The power of the current version of the system is sufficient to process MPEG SIF video format in real time. The implementation of other low bit rate video compression applications is currently being considered.