D 1 - 4 . MPEG - 4 Video for Representing Avatar Animation

The ViSiCAST project aims at improving the quality of life of Europe's deaf citizens by widening their access to services and facilities enjoyed by the community at large. The project identifies a number of aspects of life where the integration of deaf individuals in society would be improved if sign language communication was available: access to public services, commercial transactions and entertainment, learning and leisure opportunities, including broadcast and interactive television, and e-commerce and the World Wide Web. Work Package One, concerned by the present INT-ARTEMIS report aims at deploying virtual human synthetic signing in the broadcast television area. Such signing will supplement existing human sign transmission to enable a far greater percentage of programmes to be signed. The Work Package has two related aspects: the development and integration of appropriate technology, and the monitoring and establishment of appropriate standards. The continuous development of multimedia software and hardware technologies, together with the explosive growth of the Internet, leads to an increasing interest for effective compression tools of audiovisual content in order to reduce the cost of data transmission in multimedia environments. The Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) aims at providing standardized core technologies allowing efficient storage, transmission and manipulation of video data. MPEG-4 is specifically intended to cope with the requirements of multimedia applications, allowing new functionalities like video manipulation, scalable video encoding, synthetic and natural hybrid coding, 3D object compression, and face & body animation and coding. Model-based parametric video coding leads to very low bitrate compression, making possible applications like video conferencing and video-telephony, mobile multimedia communications and related applications. Such a standardized framework is considered as a requirement of the ViSiCAST project. The INT-ARTEMIS contribution consists therefore in implementing the MPEG-4 Visual tools needed in ViSiCAST, and in evaluating objectively their performances. The present report is organized as follows: Section 2 deals with a presentation of the MPEG-4 Visual tools. Section 3 presents the tools developed by INT-ARTEMIS within the ViSiCAST project, related to MPEG-4 video coding. An encoder/decoder suite has been developed and is described. Section 4 presents a synthetic view of the MPEG-4 video encoding performances related to encoding synthetic images. Section 5 deals with a bandwidth/terminal complexity analysis of several possible solutions. Conclusions of the report are presented in the final section. The MPEG-4 Visual standard allows the hybrid coding of natural (pixel based) images and video together with synthetic (computer generated) scenes. This …