ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the fundamentals of digital video coding which include digital video representation, rate distortion theory, and digital video formats. It provides a brief overview of image and video coding standards. In 1988, ISO established the moving picture expert group (MPEG) to develop standards for the coded representation of moving pictures and associated audio information for digital storage applications. MPEG completed the first phase of its work in 1991. The chapter presents the several fundamental issues of digital video coding. Motion compensation is an effective technique for discrete cosine transformation-based video coding scheme, however, it is not so effective for wavelet-based video coding. The principal goal in the design of a video coding system is to reduce the transmission rate requirements of the video source subject to some picture quality constraint. There are only two ways to accomplish this goal: reduction of the statistical redundancy and psychophysical redundancy of the video source.
