Redundancy Reduction Techniques and Content Analysis for Multimedia Services - the European COST 211quat Action

The general philosophy of COST projects is introduced before narrowing the focus to the COST 211 series. For more than 20 years COST 211 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 by ISO MPEG-4. The current phase, COST 211quat, continues to improve the Analysis Model with the additional aim of advancing the state of the art in object segmentation and recognition technologies. Such content analysis technologies will be essential to make MPEG-7 and related multimedia content description standards viable for easy and widespread use. 1. COST and the COST 211quat Action 1.1 COST