Coding tools in MPEG-4 for interlaced video

Recent developments in digital video compression, transmission, and display s have made object-based video viable for many applications, e.g., coding c hroma-keyed video for digital TV and manipulating video objects on interact ive multimedia terminals, etc. To facilitate these applications, there is a demand on international standards for coding methods and transmission form ats for object-based natural and synthetic video, For the past few years, t he Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Standards Organ ization (ISO), which successfully created the MPEG-1/2 standards, has been working to establish a new standard, called MPEG-4. MPEG-4 will provide sta ndardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production , distribution, and content-access paradigms in four fields: wireless commu nication, digital TV interactive graphics, and the World Wide Web. To meet the needs of interlaced video applications, MPEG-4 video adopted interlaced coding tools similar to those in MPEG-2 and features schemes to code multi ple video objects. This paper provides an overview of MPEG-4 interlaced cod ing tools, and focuses in detail on the new shape and texture-coding algori thms for interlaced video.