ABSTRACT
Flavor, which stands for Formal Language for Audio-Visual Object Representation, 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, according to a specified syntax. The syntax itself can have various degrees of sophistication. One of the simplest forms is the GIF87a format [2], consisting of essentially two headers and blocks of coded image data using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression. Much more complex formats include JPEG [3], MPEG-1 [4], MPEG-2 [5, 6] and MPEG-4 [7, 8], among others.
