MPEG-4 video and its potential for future multimedia services

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) committee, which originated the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video and audio compression standards, is currently developing MPEG-4 with wide industry participation. MPEG-4 is targeted for interactive multimedia applications and will become an international standard in 1998. It is expected that MPEG-4 will become the enabling technology for multimedia audio-visual communications as much as MPEG-2 has become the enabling technology for digital television. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the scope and potential of the MPEG-4 standardization activities for networked interactive multimedia applications with particular emphasis on the MPEG-4 video standard.