%0 Conference Proceedings %F dvmmPub132 %A Eleftheriadis, Alexandros %T The MPEG-4 System Description Languages: From Practice to Theory %B IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS'97) (Invited Paper) %C Hong Kong %X We provide an overview of the novel system architecture currently adopted in the ISO MPEG-4 standardization effort, as embodied in its System and Description Languages design. We briefly describe its composition capabilities, multiplexing and sychronization model, as well as the syntactic description mechanism which is based on our "Flavor" language. We also describe a theoretical framework for the analysis of algorithmic or language-based compression using "Complexity Distortion Theory," an extension of Kolmogorov Complexity theory that takes into account distortion, and show that it is a universal and the most natural framework for analyzing traditional and new compression techniques %U http://www.ee.columbia.edu/dvmm/publications/97/iscas97.pdf %8 June %D 1997