An Mpeg-4 Bifs-based Authoring Tool for Multimedia Content

In this paper, we propose an authoring tool referred to as ICCT (Interactive Content Creating Tool). The tool serves to easily generate as well as dynamically control a multimedia and interactive MPEG-4 content represented as a hierarchical scene graph. In the parametric mode of ICCT, scene-designer – using a user friendly interface for setting properties of objects in the scene can create an enriched multimedia content with various types of objects: audio, video, image, text ... Some predefined dynamic behaviors for certain types of objects are available, such as positioning the video clip in the scene, start / pause the media, ... The maximum power of interaction between the viewer and the scene as well as between objects of the scene can be obtained with the programmatic mode of the ICCT. In this mode, with the aid of script, scene-designer can flexibly define a scene, whose final multimedia content can be presented to viewer in various manners depending on request from viewer and also on the mutual interactions between objects of the scene. The combination of the two modes makes ICCT useful for both novice and experienced scene-designer to exploit the power of scene-composition and interactivity provided with the recent MPEG-4 standard in order to create sophisticated video applications.