MPEG-4 shape coding

Patent Pending The shape information is referred to as alpha planes. The techniques to be adopted by the standard will provide lossless coding of alpha planes and lossy coding of shapes and transparency information since the shape size scalable, thus allowing a tradeoffs between bit rate and accuracy of shape representation. Furthermore, intra and inter shape prediction is envisioned so as to allow both efficient random access operations as well as efficient compression of shape and transparency information.