Current Status of the MPEG-4 Audio Verification Model Development

After a short survey of the goals of the current standardization activities within MPEG-4 Audio, an introduction to the concept of the verification model (VM) based codec development is given and the current status of the VM development is described. The results of listening tests and core experiments are addressed briefly in order to allow a comparison of the expected codec efficiency with that of existing standards. 1 Introduction The goal of the MPEG-4 Audio activities within the ISO/IEC MPEG working group is to develop a standard for very low bit rate audio coding suitable for various applications in the fields of multimedia storage and communication. Since an object based representation is desired which allows content based interactivity, in addition to pure coding efficiency with bit rates ranging from 2 kbit/s to 48 kbit/s per channel other functionalities are taken into account. One important functionality is scalability, i.e. the possibility to decode lower rate subsets of a ..