Abstract: The invention provides a standardized interface facility for MPEG-4 authoring, bitstream manipulation, editing and interpretation, with associated tools and interfaces to, resulting in coded bitstreams which are easier to test, check and debug while conforming to the MPEG-4 standard. The specified interfaces can also facilitate graceful degradation in the face of decreased resources by allowing editing of bitstreams. The specified interfaces can also allow creation of decodable bitstreams in response to the user requests either directly or indirectly embedded in audiovisual applications, as well as future services. The invention specifies a bitstream input/output package in the Java programming language to facilitates bitstream encoding and decoding of audio-visual media objects, especially when coding uses the MPEG-4 standard.

Abstract: An apparatus responds to a video signal representing a succession of frames, where at least one of the frames corresponds to an image of an object, to detect at least a region of the object. The apparatus includes a processor for processing the video signal to detect at least the region of the object characterized by at least a portion of a closed curve and to generate a plurality of parameters associated with the closed curve for use in coding the video signal.