The MPEG-4 video coding standard-a VLSI point of view

The paper presents an overview of the current status of the emerging MPEG-4 video coding standard and a discussion of the potential and problems for a practical implementation. Though the high flexibility of the standard suggests a software implementation on microprocessors or DSP, a complexity analysis of the standard proved, that the required processing power for a real time codec implementation quickly reaches the limits even of future high-performance microprocessors. But even with its high number of different algorithms, the standard leaves enough design space for a successful implementation as an optimised, but flexible low-cost, low-power solution. By identifying common arithmetic and transfer properties of the algorithms involved, a partitioning into a stream, video, and composition processor is proposed. Each of the units is programmable, but dedicated to the typical requirements of each algorithm class.