What MPEG-4 means to me

The need for a standard in anycommunication is so obvious that it is notnecessary to emphasize it any further. Themain problem is to find out what kind ofstandard we need and how long it should last.Over the past three decades many things wentdigital: signals, data, telephone and audio toname the major ones. This was a technology-driven evolution, offering many advantages.Short- and long-range robustness, easilycontrollable precision, repeatability, fidelity,ease of production are so well entrenched thatwe now take them for granted.Digital technology also brought the newconcept of open system, which is not wellaccepted and used widely outside researchlaboratories. We should view an “opensystem” in its most general sense, as a systemthat does more than enable a given machineto be connected to others. A truly opensystem can evolve without questioning theexisting structure. At the product level anopen system became a must. Customers donot follow any more the fashion of buying anew car radio or a CD reader every monthbecause new models have a few more buttonsor functions (read “gadgets”) that theprevious ones did not have. The pace ofprogress is much higher than the acceptanceof the users. Open system is the obvioussolution with which all the new functions caneasily be integrated to the existing system.Attempts to make a frozen (closed) systemmore flexible is called patchworkengineering.We are all familiar with the well knownequation:MPEG-2 = MPEG-1 + epsilon.MPEG-4 is the first standard, leaving asidepatchwork and focusing on an open system,the necessary but not sufficient condition forits mid-range survival. The sufficientcondition is related to how the openness ismanaged. If there will be another MPEG-xwith x > 4, this will clearly mean that thesufficient condition has not been satisfied.Professor Murat KuntSignal Processing LaboratoryDepartment of Electrical EngineeringSwiss Federal Institute of TechnologyCH-1015 LausanneSwitzerlandTel.: +41 21 693 26 26Fax: +41 21 693 26 03e-mail: kunt@epfl.ch or m.kunt@ieee.org