ABSTRACT
The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video compression techniques developed and standardized by the MPEG group have developed into important and successful video coding standards worldwide, with an increasing number of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 VLSI chip sets and products becoming available on the market. One key factor for this success is the generic structure of the MPEG standards, sup porting a wide range of applications and application-specific parameters. To sup port the wide range of applications profiles, a diversity of input parameters, including flexible picture size and frame rate, can be specified by the user. In ad dition, MPEG standardizes only the decoder structures and the bitstream for mats, allowing a large degree of freedom for manufacturers to optimize the coding efficiency (i.e., the video quality at a given bit rate) by developing innov ative encoder algorithms even after the standards have been finalized.
