The MPEG-4 Book
MPEG-4 3D graphics: from specifications to the screen
ICCOM'06 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Communications
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Nowadays, multimedia contents are invading the digital world through a wide family of distribution channels, and are played on terminals with various capabilities and resources. In such hybrid and heterogeneous environments, the availability of international standards enabling application interoperability becomes a strong requirement. MPEG-4 is a powerful multimedia standard in terms of media representation, scene composition, and user interactivity. However, building an MPEG-4 application demands an in-depth knowledge of MPEG-4 specifications which currently limits the world wide deployment of the standard. In order to facilitate MPEG-4 usability for non-expert developers, this paper addresses the technical issues related to the implementation of an MPEG-4 Software Development Kit (SDK). By focusing on the MPEG-4 scene composition level and on the graphics representation features, we build a low-level MPEG-4 SDK (scene graph access, media and stream processing) compliant with scene and media specifications. The more specific issue of virtual character animation is addressed by developing an intuitive API; it is referred to as MPEG-4 VC API and supports high-level functionalities (data-based semantic access, hierarchical object processing and stream control). We demonstrate the relevance of this toolkit for the easy design and creation of real applications by implementing a plug-in providing MPEG-4 content importing/exporting. No particular knowledge of the MPEG-4 standard is therefore required. The SDK toolkit is extensively evaluated within the OLGA IST FP6 European Project.