Efficient encoding of binary shapes using MPEG-4

MPEG-4 Visual, that part of the upcoming MPEG-4 standard describing the coding of natural and synthetic video signals, allows the encoding of video objects using motion, texture and shape information. The MPEG-4 context-based arithmetic encoder for encoding binary shape information is presented in the context of a new MPEG-4 video encoder architecture. The encoder architecture enables us to efficiently encode lossless and lossy shape, motion and texture of a moving video object. Several non-normative choices for efficient computation and bit efficient encoding of arbitrarily shaped video objects are investigated in order to enable real-time encoding.