MPEG-4 Facial Animation

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  The MPEG-4 standard is developed over five years by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It explores every possibility of the digital environment. Recorded images and sounds co-exist with their computer-generated counterparts; a new language for sound promises compact-disk quality at extremely low data rates; and the multimedia content could even adjust itself to suit the transmission rate and quality. Possibly the greatest of the advances made by MPEG-4 is that viewers and listeners need no longer be passive. The height of ?interactivity? in audiovisual systems today is the user's ability merely to stop or start a video in progress. MPEG-4 is completely different: it allows the user to interact with objects ?within? the scene, whether they derive from so-called real sources, such as moving video, or from synthetic sources, such as computer-aided design output or cartoons. Authors of content can give users the power to modify scenes by deleting, adding, or repositioning objects, or to alter the behavior of the objects.
Perhaps the most immediate need for MPEG-4 is defensive. It supplies tools with which to create uniform (and top-quality) audio and video encoders and decoders on the Internet, preempting what may become an unmanageable tangle of proprietary formats. In addition to the Internet, the standard is also designed for low bit-rate communications devices, which are usually wireless. But whether wired or not, devices can have differing access speeds depending on the type of connection and traffic.?
On the other end of the quality/bit-rate scale, future television sets will no doubt accept content from both broadcast and interactive digital sources. Accordingly, MPEG-4 provides tools for seamlessly integrating broadcast content with equally high-quality interactive MPEG-4 objects. The expectation is for content of broadcast-grade quality to be displayed within World Wide Web screen layouts that are as varied as their designers can make them.

 

 

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