Reconfigurable embedded media processors

The rapid proliferation of embedded multimedia applications necessitates efficient implementations which satisfy the computing demands of the various media processing algorithms. Several hardware and software solutions for media processing have appeared in the recent literature. The complexity, variety of techniques and tools associated with multimedia processing points to the opportunities for reconfigurable computing devices. These devices will be able to adapt the underlying hardware dynamically in response to changes in the input data or processing environment. In order to understand the static and dynamic nature of media processing techniques, there is a need to first perform a detailed complexity analysis on the set of candidate algorithms that encompass multimedia processing. This in turn will facilitate the design of a reconfigurable embedded hardware system. In this paper, we present a summary of the various implementation alternatives for media processing followed by the proposed approach for designing reconfigurable processors. We have chosen the latest multimedia standard namely, MPEG 4 as an example to demonstrate the potential for reconfigurability.