Natural and synthetic video in MPEG-4

The ISO MPEG committee, after successful completion of the MPEG-1 and the MPEG-2 standards, has recently completed the Committee Draft for MPEG-4, its third standard. MPEG-4 is designed to be an object-based standard for multimedia coding. The visual part of the standard specifies coding of both natural and synthetic video. The MPEG-4 visual standard supports coding of natural video not only in a conventional manner (using frames) but also as a collection of arbitrary shape objects (using video object planes). Further, it supports functionalities such as spatial and temporal scalability, both conventional and with arbitrary shape objects. It also supports error resilient coding for delivery of coded video on error prone channels. MPEG-4 visual standard also supports coding of synthetic video which includes still texture maps used in 3D graphics models, mesh geometry for object animation, and parameters for facial animation.