ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the principles and various steps of video and audio compression which allow the bit-rates to be achieved, and which are being used in the various video/audio compression standards. These compression methods use general data compression algorithms applicable to any kind of data, and exploit the spatial redundancy and the specificities of visual perception for fixed pictures (JPEG), and the very high temporal redundancy between successive images in the case of moving pictures (MPEG). In the same way, audio compression methods exploit particularities of the human aural perception to reduce bitrates by eliminating inaudible information (psychoacoustic coding). MPEG-2 is the source coding standard used by the European Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) TV broadcasting system, which is the result of the work started in 1991 by the European Launching Group, later to become the DVB committee.
