Christian Liviu Tulvan

3D graphics coding in a reconfigurable environment

The main objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of Reconfigurable Graphic Coding and its validation under the form of a Functional Units (FU) library. The heterogeneity of data for 3D graphics objects representation requires the adaptability of the compression schemas to various types of content. While such adaptation can be relatively easy to support in software implementations, the same is much more difficult to implement in hardware. Although compression schemas inherently share the same data processing chain, the components forming it may vary with respect to the number and type of components to encode, data range and correlation type. Based on the analysis of the state of the art on 3D graphics compression approaches, we propose a set of processing units. We show how this set can be configured/connected into a network, including hardware networks, to obtain reference decoders. Moreover, the network can be reconfigured at runtime, based on information that is provided with the encoded object. This modular concept of functional units, allows optimized management of computation (such as identification of parallelizable functions or functions that are suitable for acceleration) relative to the hardware architecture (CPU, GPU, FPGA, etc.). In the four decoders presented, at least half of the FUs are being reused at least once. The results were performed by generating and compiling C code from RVC-CAL code and comparing the results with the MPEG reference software implementation. The FUs described in this paper were standardized by MPEG as part of the ISO/IEC 23001-4.

Functional units for 3D graphics decoders

The main objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of reconfigurable graphic coding and an implementation of this concept under the form of a functional units library. The heterogeneity of data for 3D graphics objects representation requires the adaptability of the compression schemas. Although these schemas inherently share the same classical data processing chain, the components forming it may vary with respect to the dimension, range, correlation type. Based on the analysis of traditional, yet state of the art 3D graphics compression approaches, we propose a set of processing units. We show how this set can be configured/connected into a network to obtain reference decoders. Moreover, the network can be reconfigured at the run time, based on information that is provided with the encoded object. This modular concept of functional units allows optimized management of computation relative to the hardware architecture (CPU, GPU, FPGA, etc.).