Influences of object based segmentation onto multimedia hardware architectures

This paper describes essential differences in the video coding part of recent multimedia communication schemes (as the MPEG-4 standard being currently under development) to conventional schemes (as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or ITU H.26×) caused by the possibility to work on arbitrarily shaped objects rather than only on rigid square blocks of pels. Methods employing parallel ways of operation are presented for maintaining high data throughput caused by the real time constraints of video communication schemes. Object based segmentation significantly increases the hardware costs to exploit the parallelization resources inherent with the employed algorithms. The paper compares the efficiency of recent multimedia hardware architectures when operating on object based schemes under real time constraints and proposes architectural measures to increase efficiency and performance in these cases