The MPEG-4 Book [Paperback]

Fernando Pereira (Author), Touradj Ebrahimi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130616214 | ISBN-13: 978-0130616210 | Publication Date: July 20, 2002 | Edition: 1

The MPEG-4 Book is the first comprehensive, targeted guide to the MPEG-4 standard and its use in cutting-edge multimedia applications. Leaders of the MPEG-4 standards community cover every element of the standard, and every aspect of MPEG-4 content creation and delivery, including: transport, coding, BIFS, object description and synchronization, Synthetic Natural/Hybrid Coding, MPEG-J, profiling, conformance testing, and more.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The most complete, focused guide to MPEG-4—the breakthrough standard for interactive multimedia.

• The comprehensive, focused, up-to-the-minute guide to MPEG-4
• Practical solutions for next-generation multimedia applications
• In-depth coverage of natural and synthetic audiovisual object coding, description, composition and synchronization
• Binary and textual scene description
• Transport and storage of MPEG-4 content
• MPEG-4 profiles and levels; verification tests

MPEG-4 represents a breakthrough in multimedia, delivering not just outstanding compression but also a fully interactive user experience. In The MPEG-4 Book, two leaders of the MPEG-4 standards community offer a comprehensive, targeted guide to the MPEG-4 standard—and its use in cutting-edge applications. Fernando Pereira and Touradj Ebrahimi, together with a unique collection of key MPEG experts, demonstrate how MPEG-4 addresses tomorrow's multimedia applications more successfully than any previous standard. They review every element of the standard to offer you a book that covers:

• Synthetic and natural audio and video object coding, description and synchronization
• BIFS—the MPEG-4 language for scene description and interaction
• The extensible MPEG-4 textual format XMT
• Transport and delivery of MPEG-4 content
• MPEG-J: using Java classes within MPEG-4 content
• A complete overview of MPEG-4 Profiles and Levels
• Verification tests

The authors also walk through the MPEG-4 Systems Reference Software ?offering powerful real-world insights for every product developer, software professional, engineer, and researcher involved with MPEG-4 and state-of-the-art multimedia delivery.

Part of the new IMSC Press Series from the Integrated Multimedia System Center at the University of Southern California, a federally funded center specializing in cutting-edge multimedia research.

About the Author

FERNANDO PEREIRA, Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa - Portugal, and researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações, is area editor of Signal Processing: Image Communication Journal and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. Pereira has chaired many ad hoc groups in the context of the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards' development and received an ISO certificate for his contributions to the MPEG-4 standard. His current interests include video analysis, processing, coding, description, and interactive multimedia services for Internet and mobile environments.

TOURADJ EBRAHIMI, Professor of Image Processing at EPFL's Signal Processing Lab in Switzerland, has been nominated for two ISO certificates for his contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000 standards. He leads the Swiss delegation to MPEG and JPEG, and is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, area editor of Image Communication Journal of EURASIP, and associate editor of Optical Engineering. His interests include image processing, coding, and visual information security. He holds a dozen patents.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 896 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (July 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130616214
• ISBN-13: 978-0130616210
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #959,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good explanation of the standard, but not really for application developers, May 29, 2006

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calvinnme - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The MPEG-4 Book (Paperback)

Because large parts of MPEG-4 are still unimplemented, and therefore were unimplemented when this book was published, it is mainly about how one would implement MPEG-4 according to the standard along with pretty good details on different parts of the technology. Unlike MPEG-2 where the killer application was digital television, MPEG-4 does not target a major and exclusive killer application but opens many new frontiers. The first two chapters are mainly an overview of the standard - its origins, its objectives, and its possibilities.

All components of an MPEG-4 presentation are discovered recursively through object descriptors (ODs). The details of this approach are explained in chapter 3. SDL is a convenient shorthand to express bitstream syntax of inherently object-oriented structures in a C++ kind of way, and is explained in detail in the context of MPEG-4 with several practical examples.

Chapter 4 on the "BIFS", binary format for scenes, is another practical chapter. This chapter presents the principles of MPEG-4 scene description, which is BIFS. BIFS is the scene description format designed by the MPEG Systems subgroup [MPEG4-1] to complement the object descriptor framework presented in Chapter 3. Whereas the OD framework defines the objects and their characteristics, BIFS defines how the objects are combined together for presentation. Numerous example are shown along with the scenes they generate to help explain the concept. You won't be able to help seeing the similarities between VRML and MPEG-4 scene descriptions.

Chapter 5 examines MPEG-J. MPEG-4 terminals may vary from high-quality TV set-top boxes to wireless and handheld devices. The computational capabilities and the network resources available at these terminals differ considerably. Without MPEG-J, these wide variations in resources would make it very hard to achieve the dream of create once, run anywhere. Thus, the objective of MPEG-J is to add to the presentation engine an application engine that can associate complex programmatic behavior with the presentation based on user input and terminal conditions. Although this chapter does a very good job of documenting what the MPEG-J API's shall contain and do according to the standard, the fact is that nobody has implemented them. This leaves the reader with the false feeling that this is something that is available.

Chapter 6 is about XMT, which is a textual representation of MPEG-4 system structures. These MPEG-4 systems structures are represented as XML elements, with attributes of the element containing its values. This can all become very complex, with considerable overlap between SMIL, MPEG-7, XMT, and X3D. This chapter does a good job of sorting out the difference and interoperability of all of the standards through diagrams and examples.

Chapter 7, Transporting and Storing MPEG-4 Content, details the delivery abstractions defined by DMIF (Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework), and then explains the FlexMux tool, which is a simple syntax to interleave data from various streams. This is followed by in-depth coverage of the MPEG-4 file format as well as the specification of MPEG-4 over MPEG-2 Systems transport. Finally, a summary of the ongoing work to define the transport of MPEG-4 over IP is provided.

From this point on in the book, everything is very theoretical. There are good clear examples of what speech coding, natural video coding, and general audio coding all are in general and according to the standard, complete with mathematics and good instructive figures. However, if you are coming to this book to find out who has implemented this part of the standard and how to use MPEG-4 audio coding "out of the box", in a practical sense, you will be disappointed. The only exception to this is chapter 12, on synthetic audio, where the AudioBIFS and Advanced AudioBIFS are introduced and explained via some very clear examples. Again, you are going to see big similarities between AudioBIFS and VRML.

In summary, I would say that if you want a good understanding of the MPEG-4 standard and the technologies behind it, you will not be disappointed. If you are coming to this book as an application programmer who wants to insert MPEG-4 capabilities into a program you are writing in much the same way that you download and use the Java3D API, you will leave unsatisfied, because much of this standard is yet to be implemented. Also, much has changed over the last four years so a second edition of this book pointing out what has actually been implemented during this time would be helpful. Given the book's age and lack of implementation details on the trickier parts of MPEG-4, I wouldn't recommend paying more than the discounted used-book price for it.