MPEG-4 Book, The

Preface

The last decade has shown the quick growth of multimedia applications and services, with audiovisual information playing an increasingly important role. Today's existence of tens of millions of digital audiovisual content users and consumers is tightly linked to the maturity of such technological areas as video and audio compression and digital electronics and to the timely availability of appropriate audiovisual coding standards. These standards allow the industry to make major investments with confidence in new products and applications and users to experience easy consumption and exchange of content.

In this environment, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is playing an important role, thanks to the standards it has been developing. ...