  This fourth and last tome is focusing on describing the envisioned works for
a project that has been presented in the preceding tome. It is about a new
approach dedicated to the coding of still and moving pictures, trying to bridge
the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standard bodies. The aim of this project is to define the
principles of self-descriptive video coding. In order to establish them, the
document is composed in five chapters that describe the various envisioned
techniques for developing such a new approach in visual coding: - image
segmentation, - computation of visual descriptors, - computation of perceptual
groupings, - building of visual dictionaries, - picture and video coding. Based
on the techniques of multiresolution computing, it is proposed to develop an
image segmentation made from piecewise regular components, to compute
attributes on the frame and the rendering of so produced shapes, independently
to the geometric transforms that can occur in the image plane, and to gather
them into perceptual groupings so as to be able in performing recognition of
partially hidden patterns. Due to vector quantization of shapes frame and
rendering, it will appear that simple shapes may be compared to a visual
alphabet and that complex shapes then become words written using this alphabet
and be recorded into a dictionary. With the help of a nearest neighbour
scanning applied on the picture shapes, the self-descriptive coding will then
generate a sentence made from words written using the simple shape alphabet.
