JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website

Chapter: Capita Selecta
Section: MPEG

MPEG 4

MPEG 4 is particularly designed for very low bitrate coding of audiovisual material The definition of the standard began officially in September 1993. It is scheduled to result in a draft specification in 1997.

MPEG 4 intends to use bitrates of up to 64 kbit/s at good quality, so new coding techniques allowing higher compression than traditional (Discrete Cosine Transform) techniques may be necessary. MPEG 4 most likely will apply fundamentally new algorithms for compression, including model-based image coding, human interaction with multimedia environments, and low bitrate speech coding. MPEG 4 research investigate among other things morphology, fractals and model based compression.

MPEG-4 will support new applications, including interactive mobile multimedia communications, videophone, mobile audio-visual communication, multimedia electronic mail, remote sensing, electronic newspapers, interactive multimedia databases, multimedia videotex, games, interactive computer imagery.

MPEG 4 aims at applications using sampling dimensions up to 176 x 144 x 10 Hz and coded bit rates between 4800 and 64,000 bits/sec.


JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website © Jean-Paul M.G. Linnartz, 1993, 1995.