Welcome to the Fully Configurable Video Coding project.

We propose a new video coding paradigm, namely fully configurable video coding, which goes beyond previous work on reconfigurable video coding to enable dynamic video codec reconfiguration. This radical new approach has the potential to dramatically improve compression efficiency and image quality and will enable new ideas and technologies to be implemented rapidly and flexibly. It opens up exciting new challenges for video compression research and offers significant potential benefits to a wide range of video-based applications. In the new paradigm, a universal decoder can be configured as any standard-based or proprietary design of video decoder, without downloading new software. The universal decoder can be re-designed during decoding, adapting its configuration to maximise video compression performance. This will be achieved by specifying new or changed video coding functions at the encoder, communicating these changes to the decoder, creating them in the decoder and carrying on with decoding using the new functions.

This work will establish a framework for Fully Configurable Video Coding and will demonstrate adaptation, communication and instantiation of decoding structures in a prototype fully-configurable video codec.

At present please visit the Sourceforge project page to find out more or to get involved.

Iain Richardson 19 November 2007.