DYNAMIC APPROACH TO VISUAL DATA-COMPRESSION

This paper presents the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) p roposal to MPEG-4 video coding standardization activity [1]. The propo sed technique is based on a novel approach to audio-visual data compre ssion entitled dynamic coding, The newly born multimedia environment s upports a plethora of applications which cannot be covered adequately by a single compression technique. Dynamic coding offers the opportuni ty to combine several compression techniques and segmentation strategi es. Given a particular application, these two degrees of freedom can b e constrained and assembled in order to produce a particular profile w hich meets the set of specifications dictated by the application. The basic principles of this approach are presented together with the data representation system. The major characteristics of dynamic coding ar e reviewed, along with simulation results showing the performance of s uch an approach in a very low bit-rate video coding environment.