Flavor A Language for Media Representation.pdf

a r X i v : c s / 0 3 0 1 0 0 3 v 1 [ c s .P L ] 7 J a n 2 0 0 3 Flavor: A Language for Media Representation Alexandros Eleftheriadis, Danny Hong, and Yuntai Kyong Department of Electrical Engineering? Columbia University New York, NY 10027, USA January 6, 2003 Abstract Flavor (Formal Language for Audio-Visual Object Representation) has been created as a language for describing coded multimedia bitstreams in a formal way so that the code for reading and writing bitstreams can be automatically generated. It is an extension of C++ and Java, in which the typing system incorporates bitstream representation semantics. This allows describing in a single place both the in-memory representation of data as well as their bitstream-level (compressed) representation. Flavor also comes with a translator that automatically generates standard C++ or Java code from the Flavor source code so that direct access to compressed multimedia information by application developers can be achieved with essentially zero programming. Flavor has gone through many en- hancements and this paper fully describes the latest version of the language and the translator. The software has been made into an open source project as of Version 4.1, and the latest downloadable Flavor package is available at . 1 Introduction Flavor originated from the need to simplify and speed up the development of software that processes coded audio-visual or general multimedia information. This includes encoders and decoders as well as applications that manipulate such information. Examples include editing tools, synthetic content creation tools, multimedia indexing and search engines, etc. Such information is invariably encoded in a highly efficient form to minimize the cost of storage and transmission. This source coding [1] operation is almost always performed in a bitstream-oriented fashion: the data to be represented is converted to a sequence of binary values of arbitrary (and typically variable) lengths, accor