Performance comparison of multiplexing techniques for MPEG-4 object-based content

A study of the performance of a number of different multiplexing schemes was conducted in the context of streaming of MPEG-4 object-based content, with particular emphasis on streaming content to mobile devices. The comparison involved six different schemes. The schemes differed in terms of how they packed the data for each arbitrarily shaped video object into packets. An experimental testbed was constructed to compare the performance of the different schemes. The experiments showed that the scheme in which no effort is made to maximise the amount of data in the packet performs worse than the others in terms of the amount of overhead it generates and the video quality obtained when it is used to stream content. The other schemes did exhibit small differences in terms of the amount of overhead generated and video quality obtained, but the differences were not sufficiently large to be able to identify any as being clearly better than the others.