INTRODUCTION TO CONTENT-BASED VISUAL PROCESSING - Video Object Extraction and Representation: Theory and Applications - page 13

Figure 1.6. Timeline of MPEG Efforts: 1988, Establishment of MPEG and Start of
MPEG-1; 1990, Start of MPEG-2; Aug. 1993, MPEG-1 Standard Finalized ; 1994,
Start of MPEG-4 Project ; Nov. 1994, MPEG-2 Standard Finalized ; 1998, Start of
MPEG-7 Project ; Oct. 1998, MPEG-4 Standard Finalized ; Sept. 2001 , Projected
Date of Finalization of MPEG-7 Standard.
MPEG meetings provide a forum for academic and industrial interests
to conceptually develop video standards. The discussions at the syn-
tactic level frame problems and their implications upon the nature of
the video information representation and extraction. Important issues
may be introduced in theoretical fashion at the syntactic level while its
relevance may be discussed in terms of the extending the syntax. The
MPEG standards also aid implementation by streamlining application
and hardware interface. The MPEG meetings provide a regularly timed
meetings to compare results, organize current efforts, and steer research
toward the future challenges of video processing (see Figure 1.6).
In our own work, the MPEG standards guide our research efforts. Just
as the MPEG standards help to focus the effort of industrial develop-
ment, they also provide support and motivation for the futuristic appli-
cations and fit research efforts within the larger context of content-based
video processing. Instead of working on a single content-based processing
problem in isolation, the MPEG standards provide the context within
which we can understand 1) what input the system receives, 2) how to
evaluate the system results and 3) how the system must interface to other
systems. Each major video standard (MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7)
reflects the structure of this topic in theory and application. Although
the MPEG-1/ 2 standard is tangential to our work, it introduces and
establishes important concepts about the video sequence. The MPEG-4
standard introduces our first key content-based problem of video object
extraction. The MPEG-7 standard introduces our second key content-