Coding tools in MPEG-4 for interlaced video

Previous developments in digital video compression, transmission, and displays have made object-based video viable for many applications, e.g., coding chroma-keyed video for digital TV and manipulating video objects on interactive multimedia terminals, etc. To facilitate these applications, there is a demand on international standards for coding methods and transmission formats for object-based natural and synthetic video. For the past few years, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Standards Organization (ISO), which successfully created the MPEG-1/2 standards, has been working to establish a new standard, called MPEG-4. MPEG-4 will provide standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution, and content-access paradigms in four fields: wireless communication, digital TV, interactive graphics, and the World Wide Web. To meet the needs of interlaced video applications, MPEG-4 video adopted interlaced coding tools similar to those in MPEG-2 and features schemes to code multiple video objects. This paper provides an overview of MPEG-4 interlaced coding tools, and focuses in detail on the new shape and texture-coding algorithms for interlaced video.