Chapter 39: Video Compression: State of the Art and New Trends


Luis Torres
Department of Signal Theory and Communications
Technical University of Catalonia

Barcelona, Spain
<luis@gps.tsc.upc.es>

Edward Delp
Purdue University
School of Electrical Engineering
West Lafayette, IN, USA
<ace@ecn.purdue.edu>

1. Introduction

Image and video coding is one of the most important topics in image processing and digital communications. During the last thirty years we have witnessed a tremendous explosion in research and applications in the visual communications field. The field is now mature as is proven by the large number of applications that make use of this technology. Digital Video Broadcasting, Digital Versatile Disc, and Internet streaming are only a few of the applications that use compression technology. There is no doubt that the beginning of the new century revolves around the "information society." Technologically speaking, the information society will be driven by audio and visual applications that allow instant access to multimedia information. This technological success would not be possible without image and video compression. Image and video standards have played a key role in this deployment. The advent of coding standards, adopted in the past years, has allowed people around world to experience the "digital age." Each standard represents the state of the art in compression at the particular time that it was adopted. Now is the time to ask: are there any new ideas that may advance the current technology? Have we reached a saturation point in image and video compression research? Although the future is very difficult to predict, this chapter will try to provide a brief summary of the state of the art and an overview to where this exciting area is heading. Section 2 presents a brief summary of the technology related to present still image and video compression standards. Further developments in the standards will also be presented.

Section 3 presents ideas as to how compression techniques will evolve and where the state of the art will be in the future. We will also describe new trends in compression research such as joint source/channel coding and scalable compression. Section 4 will introduce preliminary results of face coding in which a knowledge-based approach will be shown as a promising technique for very low bit rate video coding. Section 5 describes media streaming which is a new and exciting area for compression research.




Handbook of Video Databases. Design and Applications
Handbook of Video Databases: Design and Applications (Internet and Communications)
ISBN: 084937006X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393

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