An important merit of the MPEG-4 video standard is that it not only provided tools and algorithms for enhancing the compression efficiency of existing MPEG-2 and H.263 standards but also contributed key innovative solutions for new multimedia applications such as real-time video streaming to PCs and cell phones over Internet and wireless networks, interactive services, and multimedia access. Many of these solutions are currently used in practice or have been important stepping-stones for new standards and technologies. In this book, we do not aim at providing a complete reference for MPEG-4 video as many excellent references on the topic already exist. Instead, we focus on three topics that we believe formed key innovations of MPEG-4 video and that will continue to serve as an inspiration and basis for new, emerging standards, products, and technologies. The three topics highlighted in this book are object-based coding and scalability, Fine Granularity Scalability, and error resiliencetools. This book is aimed at engineering students as well as professionals interested in learning about these MPEG-4 technologies for multimedia streaming and interaction. Finally, it is not aimed as a substitute or manual for the MPEG-4 standard, but rather as a tutorial focused on the principles and algorithms underlying it.
Mihaela van der Schaar received both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Prior to joining the UCLA Electrical Engineering Department faculty on July 1st, 2005, she was between 1996 and June 2003 a senior researcher at Philips Research in the Netherlands and USA, where she led a team of researchers working on multimedia coding, processing, networking, and streaming algorithms and architectures. From January to September 2003, she was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. From July 1st, 2003 until July 1st, 2005, she was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of California, Davis. Prof. van der Schaar has published extensively on multimedia compression, processing, communications, networking and architectures and holds 22 granted US patents and several more pending. Since 1999, she was an active participant to the ISO MotionPicture Expert Group (MPEG) standard to which she made more than 50 contributions and for which she received two ISO recognition awards. She was also chairing for three years the ad-hoc group on MPEG-21 Scalable Video Coding, and also co-chairing the MPEG ad-hoc group on Multimedia Test-bed. She was a guest editor of the EURASIP Special issue on multimedia over IP and wireless networks and the general chair of Picture Coding Symposium 2004, the oldest conference on image/video coding. She is a senior member of IEEE, and was also elected as a Member of the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia from 2002-2005 and SPIE Electronic Imaging Journal in 2003. Currently, she is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System for Video Technology and an Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters. She received the NSF CAREER Award in December 2004 and the IBM Faculty Award in July 2005. Deepak S. Turaga is currently a research staff member in the Media Delivery Architecture department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. He was previously a Senior Member of Research Staff at Philips Research USA, and a Senior Research Engineer at Sony Electronics. He received a B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1997 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 1999 and 2001, respectively. His interests lie primarily in multimedia coding and streaming, and computer vision applications. In these areas he has published over 30 journal and conference papers and one book chapter. He has also filed over fifteen invention disclosures, and has participated actively in MPEG standardization activities. He is a member of several program committees and an active reviewer for different journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Thomas Stockhammer has been working at the NoMoR Research, Germany, and was visiting researcher at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY and at the University of San Diego, California (UCSD) on System and Cross-Layer Design for Wireless Video Transmission and related areas. He has published more than 10 journal and more than 70 conference papers in related areas. He is member of different program committees and regularly reviews papers for different journals and conferences. He also holds several patents and regularly participates and contributes to different international standardization activities, e.g. ISO MPEG, ITU VCEG, JVT, IETF, 3GPP, and DVB and has co-authored more than 100 technical contributions. He is acting chairman of the video adhoc group of 3GPP SA4. In addition, he is also co-founder and CTO of Novel Mobile Radio (NoMoR) Research, a company working on the simulation, emulation, and demonstration of emerging and future mobile multi-user networks and the integration of IP-based applications. Since 2004, he is working as a research and development consultant for Siemens Mobile Devices, now BenQ mobile in Munich, Germany. His research interests include video transmission, cross-layer and system design, forward error correction, content delivery protocols, multimedia broadcast, rate distortion optimization, information theory, and mobile communications.
