Delivering MPEG-4 Based Audio-Visual Services investigates the
different aspects of end-to-end multimedia services; content creation,
server and service provider, network, and the end-user terminal.
Part I provides a comprehensive introduction to digital video
communications, MPEG standards, and technologies, and deals with system
level issues including standardization and interoperability, user
interaction, and the design of a distributed video server. Part II
investigates the systems in the context of object-based multimedia
services and presents a design for an object-based audio-visual
terminal, some of these features having been adopted by the MPEG-4
Systems specification. The book goes on to study the requirements for a
file format to represent object-based audio-visual content and the
design of one such format. The design introduces new concepts such as
direct streaming that are essential for scalable servers. The final part
of the book examines the delivery of object-based multimedia
presentations and gives optimal algorithms for multiplex-scheduling of
object-based audio-visual presentations, showing that the audio-visual
object scheduling problem is NP-complete in the strong sense. The
problem of scheduling audio-visual objects is similar to the problem of
sequencing jobs on a single machine. The book compares these problems
and adapts job-sequencing results to audio-visual object scheduling, and
provides optimal algorithms for scheduling presentations under resource
constraints, such as bandwidth (network constraints) and buffer
(terminal constraints). In addition, the book presents algorithms that
minimize the resources required for scheduling presentations and the
auxiliary capacity required to support interactivity in object-based
audio-visual presentations.
Delivering MPEG-4 Based Audio-Visual Services is essential reading for
researchers and practitioners in the areas of multimedia systems
engineering and multimedia computing, network professionals, service
providers, and all scientists and technical managers interested in the
most up-to-date MPEG standards and technologies.
