Preface to First Edition

Television is an important part of our lives. In developing countries, where the TV sets can outnumber telephones by more than 50, its impact can be even greater. Advances in the multimedia industry and advent of digital TV and other services will only increase its influence in global terms.

There is a considerable and growing will to support these developments through global standards. As an example, the call for videoconferencing proposals in the 1980s, which led to the H.261 audiovisual codec, attracted 15 proposals; in February 1999 650 research proposals on MPEG-7 were submitted to the MPEG committee meeting in Lancaster, UK.

This book aims to address some of these exciting developments by looking at the fundamentals behind them. The intention is to provide material which is useful to a wide range of readers, from researchers in video coding to managers in the multimedia industry.

In writing this book I have made use of invaluable documents prepared by the working parties of the ISO/IEC and ITU. I am also in debt to the work of my former and current research students and assistants. In particular I would like to acknowledge the work by: Pedro Assuancao, Soroush Ghanbari, Ebroul Izquierdo, Fernando Lopes, Antonio Pinheiro, Eva Rosdiana, Vassilis Seferidis, Tamer Shanableh, Eduardo da Silva, Kuan Hui Tan, Kwee Teck Tan, Qi Wang, David Wilson and John Woods, who have directly or indirectly contributed to the realisation of this book.

Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my mentor Professor Charles Hughes, who with his great vision and tireless effort taught me how to be a competitive researcher. He encouraged me to write this book, and very patiently read every chapter of it and made numerous valuable comments. Charles, thanks for everything.

Mohammed Ghanbari
June 1999