Summary

The subject of video coding is of fundamental importance to many areas in engineering and the natural and perceptual sciences. Video engineering is quickly becoming a largely digital discipline although analog TV transmission is still by far the mainstay around the world. Digital transmission of television signals via satellites is commonplace, and widespread HDTV terrestrial transmission began in 2000 and is targeted to become the default transmission standard in the United States by 2006. Video compression is an absolute requirement for the growth and success for the low bandwidth transmission and storage of digital video signals. Video encoding is used wherever digital video communications, storage, processing, acquisition, and reproduction occur. The transmission of high quality multimedia information over high speed computer networks is a central problem in the design of quality of services (QoS) for digital transmission providers. The Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) finalized four well known encoding standards, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and MPEG-7. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 define methods for the transmission of digital video information for multimedia and television formats. The MPEG-4 standard, which was adopted in 1999, specifically addresses the transmission of very low bit rate video by introducing the notion of media objects which are made up of audio, visual, or audiovisual content. It is targeted to satisfy the needs of audiovisual content authors, service providers, and end users. The MPEG-7 standard, which was adopted in 2001, defines audiovisual content storage and retrieval services (Sections 9.1 and 9.2 discuss video storage and retrieval). An aspect central to each of the MPEG standards are the video encoding and decoding algorithms that make digital video applications practical. The MPEG standards are discussed in Sections 6.4 and 6.5.