MPEG-4 which is currently being developed by MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group), is poised to become a standard for supporting current and emerging interactive multimedia applications. The objective of MPEG-4 is to support content-based compression, communication, access and manipulation of digital objects which can be natural or synthetic. Since MPEG-4 based video consists of objects and provides full interactivity between the client and the server, a software-based implementation seems to be the only viable approach for building an MPEG-4 encoder. Parallel processing solves the problem of large computational requirements for building a real-time encoder. In this paper, we describe a parallel implementation of MPEG-4 video encoder using a cluster of workstations collectively working as a virtual machine. Parallelization of the MPEG-4 encoder poses an interesting problem since not only can objects be added or deleted from a video scene but their sizes and shapes may vary with time. ...
Yong He, Ishfaq Ahmad, Ming L. Liou