2EDUNDANCY 2EDUCTION 4ECHNIQUES AND #ONTENT !NALYSIS FOR -ULTIMEDIA 3ERVICES THE %UROPEAN #/34 QUAT !CTION

!BSTRACT. The general philosophy of COST projects is introd uced before narrowing the focus to the COST 211 series. For more than 20 years COST 21 1 has been concerned with image coding and compression using redundancy removal techniques . Within COST 211ter an Analysis Model was developed for the automatic and semi-automatic segmentation of motion video and significant parts of this work have been endorsed b y ISO MPEG-4. The current phase, COST 211quat, continues to improve the Analysis Model wi th the additional aim of advancing the state of the art in object segmentation and recognition t echnologies. Such content analysis technologies will be essential to make MPEG-7 and r elated multimedia content description standards viable for easy and widespread use.