MPEG-4 Character Animation

. MPEG-4 provides standard and unified ways to: - Represent units of audiovisual contents, called “media objects”. - Describe the composition of these objects to create compound media objects that form audio visual scenes; - Multiplex and synchronize the data associated with media objects, to transport them over network channels, providing appropriate QoS; and - Interact with the audiovisual scene on the receiver’s end. The geometric representation and animation of synthetic characters (Virtual Humans and cartoon-like characters) is well specified in MPEG-4. The following is a brief overview of the MPEG-4 specification for character animation.

[1]  Jörn Ostermann,et al.  Efficient modeling of virtual humans in MPEG-4 , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. ICME2000. Proceedings. Latest Advances in the Fast Changing World of Multimedia (Cat. No.00TH8532).

[2]  Jörn Ostermann,et al.  Very low bit rate coding of virtual human animation in MPEG-4 , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. ICME2000. Proceedings. Latest Advances in the Fast Changing World of Multimedia (Cat. No.00TH8532).

[3]  Françoise J. Prêteux,et al.  Advanced animation framework for virtual character within the MPEG-4 standard , 2002, Proceedings. International Conference on Image Processing.

[4]  Françoise J. Prêteux,et al.  Critic review on MPEG-4 face and body animation , 2002, Proceedings. International Conference on Image Processing.

[5]  Jörn Ostermann,et al.  An Animation Definition Interface Rapid Design of MPEG-4 Compliant Animated Faces and Bodies , 1998 .

[6]  Baining Guo,et al.  Emerging Web Graphics Standards and Technologies , 2003, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[7]  M. Gutierrez,et al.  A MPEG-4 virtual human animation engine for interactive web based applications , 2002, Proceedings. 11th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[8]  Daniel Thalmann,et al.  Controlling Virtual Humans Using PDAs , 2003, MMM.