This report presents the benefits of using the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) methodology to solve major difficulties encountered by usual high level synthesis (HLS) flows. These advantages are highlighted in a design space exploration environment we propose. MDE is the skeleton of our HLS flow dedicated to intensive signal processing to demonstrate the expected benefits of these software technologies extended to hardware design. Both users and designers of the design flow benefit from the MDE methodology, participating to a concrete and effective advancement in the high level synthesis research domain. The flow is automatized from UML specifications to VHDL code generation and has been successfully evaluated for the conception of a video processing application.