An MPEG-4 based interactive multimedia system

With the rapid convergence in telecommunications, computer, and TV/film industries, rigorous efforts are in progress for designing the emerging multimedia standard-MPEG-4. The main features of MPEG-4 are its content-based interactivity, efficient coding, and universal access. For realizing MPEG-4 based application oriented systems, various issues must be carefully addressed. This paper describes a full scale MPEG-4 based interactive multimedia system project underway at the Video Technology Center of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. This project aims to provide complete MPEG-4 based interactive services tailored to various applications. In order to do so, a number of key enabling technologies need to be investigated. These include encoding and decoding, multimedia server design, a user interface, and MPEG-4 stream transmission over high speed networks. The unique features of the project are: (1) to explore the feasibility of parallel and distributed technology using a network-of-workstations (NOWs) to hinder the intensive computation required for real-time encoding; (2) to provide flexibility of software-based encoding/decoding; (3) to design an intelligent transport service mechanism which can satisfy the QoS requirement of MPEG-4.