Development of an MPEG-4 scene converter for rich media services in mobile environments

Abstract

MPEG-4 BIFS is a major rich media standard that has been selected as the standard technology for data broadcasts and interactive contents on DMB. BIFS defines various audio/visual nodes and two- and three-dimensional graphic nodes, as well s the interactions of many users, but it is not appropriate for the mobile environment with limited performance. Therefore, this study proposes a method of converting MPEG-4 BIFS to an MPEG-4 LASeR format that is appropriate to the mobile environment, to service rich media in a mobile environment. First, the scene structure and nodes of MPEG-4 BIFS and LASeR were comparatively analyzed. It is not difficult to convert BIFS to LASeR for most 2D nodes. Since LASeR does not support 3D, however, it is difficult to convert 3D nodes to LASeR. To solve this problem, this study extracted the coordinate characteristic values of BIFS 3D nodes and converts them to 2D coordinates to express LASeR as SVG. To test this method of conversion, a system that converts BIFS to LASeR was created. This allowed the provision of diverse rich media services, including 2D and 3D services, from a mobile device. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.