Performance benchmarking of RVC based multimedia specifications

The Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) framework was developed to specify video codecs as abstract and as much as possible implementation-agnostic descriptions, which are supposed to be processed by code synthesis tools to automatically generate implementations for different target languages and platforms. However, there are still questions about if the run-time performance of these automatically generated RVC-based codec implementations is good enough to run efficiently on different target platforms. In this paper, we present a performance benchmarking study on various RVC-based multimedia specifications (H.264/AVC and JPEG codecs, and four multimedia security systems based on these codecs), which covers the following two aspects: 1) the run-time performance against their corresponding non-RVC implementations on a single-core machine; 2) the performance gain these RVC-based implementations on a dual-core machine. Based on our benchmarking results, which show that RVC-based multimedia implementations achieve adequate/acceptable performance, we conclude that RVC has the potential to become a general-purpose but still performance-efficient development framework for many application domains.