An introduction to the MPEG-4 animation framework eXtension

This paper presents the MPEG-4 Animation Framework eXtension (AFX) standard, ISO/IEC 14496-16. Initiated by the MPEG Synthetic/Natural Hybrid Coding group in 2000, MPEG-4 AFX proposes an advanced framework for interactive multimedia applications using both natural and synthetic objects. Following this model, new synthetic objects have been specified, increasing content realism over existing MPEG-4 synthetic objects. The general overview of MPEG-4 AFX is provided on top of the review of MPEG-4 standards to explain the relationship between MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 AFX. Then we give a bird´s-eye view of new tools available in this standard.