ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the International Standards Organization (ISO) Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)-4 standard. The MPEG-4 work includes natural video, synthetic video, audio, and systems. For end users, MPEG-4 can provide much functionality to make the user terminal have more capabilities of interaction with the content. The MPEG-4 supports the content-based manipulation and bitstream coding without the need for transcoding. The concept of a video object provides several functionalities of MPEG-4 that are either impossible or very difficult in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video coding. The MPEG-4 supports combining synthetic scenes or objects with natural scenes or objects. The major feature of MPEG-4 is to provide the technology for object-based compression, which is capable of separately encoding and decoding video objects. For object-based coding, the coding task includes two parts: texture coding and shape coding. Still texture coding is designed for high visual quality applications in transmission and rendering of texture.
