Object-Oriented Television
V. Michael Bove, Jr.
MIT Media Laboratory
SMPTE Journal, 104, Dec. 1995, pp. 803-807.
In search of more compression, researchers have recently sought to
describe digital video of real scenes not as sequences of frames but
rather as collections of objects that are rendered and combined
according to scripting information. Depending upon the application and
the scene analysis tools available, representations may range from
two-dimensional layers to full three-dimensional
computer-graphics-style data bases. The significance of these more
meaningful representations goes beyond compression, however, enabling new forms
of interactivity and personalization, as well as new degrees of
freedom in post-production. This paper proposes a computational
framework for a television receiver that can handle digital video in
forms from ``traditional'' motion-compensated transform coders to sets
of three-dimensional objects and discusses the requirements for a
scripting language to control such a receiver. It is also noted that the
concept of scalability can be expanded to include
``intelligently resizable video,'' where the originator of a video
sequence can specify how the scene is to be composed and cut for
displays of differing sizes and aspect ratios.