Object-based encoding has long been discussed within the MPEG community. MPEG-4 included VRML as a sort of hack for scene based compositing and Structured Audio

Object-based encoding has long been discussed within the MPEG community. MPEG-4 included VRML as a sort of hack for scene based compositing and Structured Audio Orchestration Language et al, as a parallel. I saw early whitepapers where they had planned even to do things like recognize people's faces, and deduce geometry, thereby separately compressing a person in the foreground vs background (use case: conference calls, news anchors, etc) As for whether it is possible to deduce 3D structure 2D, there's been some progress in that regard, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiSK7OMANw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiSK7OMANw