Performance evaluation of the MPEG-4 visual coding standard

We first present an overview of the MPEG-4 video standard and its relationship to other existing as well as evolving video standards. MPEG-4 video, while introducing a new paradigm of treating each object in a scene independently, utilizes the traditional motion compensated DCT framework for coding of each object. Thus, while introducing new object based coding functionality, it is also capable of providing traditional frame-based coding. Furthermore, it supports advanced functionalities such as efficient coding of background as a sprite, robustness to channel errors, spatial and temporal scalability of arbitrary shape objects etc. Next, we evaluate the statistical performance of the MPEG-4 video under a number of selected conditions and compare it, depending on the application, with the H.263, the MPEG-1 and the MPEG-2 standards. For each traditional application, based on our limited set of experiments, MPEG-4 video appears to provide equal or better performance when compared to the most suitable existing standard addressing that application area. For the new object based applications, although MPEG-4 video when coding arbitrary shaped objects, incurs additional coding costs, perhaps with further optimization, the increased cost may be offset by improved tradeoffs in coding quality control, channel bandwidth and decoding resource adaptations.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.