Video coding for storing movies on CD-ROM with on the order of 1.2 Mbits/s
allocated to video coding and 256 kbits/s allocated to audio coding, which led to
the initial ISO MPEG-1 (Motion Picture Experts Group) standard [8].
s
Video coding for broadband ISDN, broadcast and for storing video on DVD
(Digital Video Disks) with on the order of 2–400 Mbits/s allocated to video and
audio coding, which led to the ISO MPEG-2 video coding standard [9]. The ITU
has given this standard the number H.262.
s
Video coding for object-based coding at rates as low as 8 kbits/s, and as high as
1 Mbits/s, or higher, which led to the ISO MPEG-4 video coding standard [10].
Key aspects of this standard include independent coding of objects in a picture; the
ability to interactively composite these objects into a scene at the display; the ability
to combine graphics, animated objects, and natural objects in the scene; and
finally the ability to transmit scenes in higher dimensionality formats (e.g., 3D).
Before delving in to details of standards, a few general remarks are in order. It is
important to note that standards specify syntax and semantics of the compressed bit
stream produced by the video encoder, and how this bit stream is to be parsed and
decoded (i.e., decoding procedure) to produce a decompressed video signal. However,
many algorithms and parameter choices in the encoding are not specified (such as
motion estimation, selection of coding modes, allocation of bits to different parts of
the picture, etc.) and are left open and depend greatly on encoder implementation.
However it is a requirement that resulting bit stream from encoding be compliant to
the specified syntax. The result is that the quality of standards based video codecs,
even at a given bitrate, depends greatly on the encoder implementation. This explains
why some implementations appear to yield better video quality than others.
In the following sections, we provide brief summaries of each of these video
standards, with the goal of describing the basic coding algorithms as well as the
features that support use of the video coding in multimedia applications.