Distributed authoring of object-based av applications

A new generation of interactive, aiidiovisiral applications andsewices will he available hy using an ohjecthased approach ,/or production and coding of aiidiovisiial content. Such an ohject and scene concept i s specified in the standard MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496). Especial!r. the various opportiinities descrihed in the system part open a wide range oJ novel applications. Object-based coding needs novel methods. conceptc and systems .fur content creation and distrihirtion. In this paper a server-bared system .for di.strihiited asthoring of object-based aiidiovi.wa1 applications according to the MPEG-4 standard is presented. An airthoring s,vstem consisting of' an aiithoring server and dtferent ailthoring tools are realized.' Index Terms audiovisual, Authoring, MPEG-4, Multimedia 1. 1NTRODUCTlON sources into defined 3D environments. The source data has lo be acquired, coded and transmitted in an efficient' way. Interactivity is another important requirement when developing user applications. Exemplary application systems are developed in order to show the intentions and the extended features of the object-based approach of MPEG-4. These new methods for representing audiovisual content require novel ideas for production, authoring, and managing the resulting data. The content description conforming to MPEG-4 is scalable, platform independent, and suitable for the play out on various consumer devices, ranging e.g. from HDTV devices to mobile phones [ 3 ] . Most current authoring tools cover the field of 2D applications, e.g. for interactive TV or lntemet applications. The support of collaborative work in a distributed authoring process is disregarded.