Video Compression

Video compression has been a key enabling technology for a variety of consumer electronics devices and applications such as camera phones, DVD players, personal media players, digital camcorders, streaming video and video conferencing. This chapter provides an overview of video compression basics and video coding standards developed by International Telecommunications Union-T and International Organization for Standardization /IEC MPEG. Video sequences contain a lot of redundancies and removing these redundancies is the fundamental objective of video compression. Video compression is essential for transmitting or storing digital video. The goal of video compression is to encode digitized video using as few bits as possible while maintaining acceptable visual quality. Video compression is achieved by removing redundancies in the video signal. By sending only the perceptually significant information, data compression can be achieved. Difference blocks typically consume fewer bits than original blocks leading to frame difference coding providing better compression performance than conditional replenishment.