Designing object-based audio-visual content representation format for mobile devices

Mobile devices today are able to play increasingly rich multimedia content. While the computing capability of a mobile device is a known quantity, the communications capabilities and available battery vary continuously. We propose to use object based content representation to enable content adaptation under low power and/or low bandwidth conditions. We show why the scene description format of MPEG-4 (BIFS) is not suitable for mobile devices and develop basic functionalities of content description formats for mobile devices. We discuss the design principles of a format we are developing, called OCode, that uses non-traditional content representation techniques such as object based representation to enable content adaptation under low bandwidth and battery conditions.