An MPEG-4 Renderer for High Quality Video Composition and Texture Mapping

This paper presents the hardware architecture of a co-processor supporting the real time rendering of all 2D natural or synthetic visual objects proposed by the MPEG-4 standard as well as sprite decoding. It enables the composition and the transformation of natural video objects and the texture mapping on triangles, allowing the 2D-mesh decoding. This architecture is able to render scenes that are compliant with MPEG-4 Main Profile, Level3 and Hybrid Visual Profile. The co-processor is designed to be used in a shared memory system architecture. It consists in a dedicated implementation that seeks the best compromise between cost and performances. In a first step, a software model is used to guarantee the visual quality of the rendered scene and to validate the algorithmic choices. Then, the complexity and performances of this novel architecture are evaluated. Finally, a behavioral model validates the architectural choices.