Software synthesis of CAL actors for the MPEG reconfigurable Video Coding framework

The MPEG reconfigurable video coding (RVC) framework aims to provide a unified specification of all video technology. In this framework, a decoder is modularly built as a configuration of video coding tools taken from the MPEG toolbox library. The elements of the library are specified using the CAL actor language. CAL is a dataflow based language providing computation models that are concurrent and modular. This paper presents a synthesis tool that from a CAL specification generates C code. Indeed, code generators are fundamental supports for the deployment and success of the MPEG RVC framework. This paper focuses on the automatic translation of a CAL actor. This approach has been used to obtain a C implementation of the inverse DCT module which is part of the MPEG-4 Simple Profile decoder, chosen by MPEG experts to validate the RVC approach. The generated code is validated against the original CAL description and simulated using the Open Dataflow environment.