ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors introduce the fundamentals of digital video coding, which include digital video representation, rate distortion theory, and digital video formats. They provide a brief overview of image and video coding standards. Digital video coding techniques have been investigated over several decades. There are two factors that make video compression possible: the statistical structure of the data in the video source and the psychophysical redundancy of human vision. 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. The fast growth of digital transmission services has generated a great deal of interest in the digital transmission of video signals. It is interesting to note that in terms of video compression methods, there is a growing convergence towards motion-compensated, interframe discrete cosine transform algorithms represented by the video coding standards.
