A survey of media processing approaches

Multimedia processing is becoming increasingly important with a wide variety of applications ranging from multimedia cellphones to high-definition interactive television. Media processing involves the capture, storage, manipulation and transmission of multimedia objects such as text, handwritten data, audio objects, still images, 2D/3D graphics, animation, and full-motion video. A number of implementation strategies have been proposed for processing multimedia data. These approaches can be broadly classified based on the evolution of processing architectures and the functionality of the processors. In order to provide media processing solutions to different consumer markets, designers have combined some of the classical features from both the functional and evolution-based classifications resulting in many hybrid solutions. We propose a categorization of existing microprocessors based on a combination of both architectural and functional flavors with examples of each approach from the latest multimedia processing families. The varying processing requirements in multimedia computing for reconfigurable multimedia processing are presented.