Very low bitrate video coding and MPEG-4: Still a good relation

MPEG-4 emerged recently as an important development in the field of audio-visual coding aiming at establishing the first content-based audio-visual coding standard. This paper intends to analyse the current relation between MPEG-4 and very low bitrate video coding and corresponding applications, notably by considering the MPEG-4 objectives, functionalities and recent technical developments related to video coding.