Page 10 - Video Coding for Mobile Communications Efficiency, Complexity, and Resilience

Preface

Scope and Purpose of the Book

Motivated by the vision of being able to communicate from anywhere at any
time with any type of information, a natural convergence of mobile and multi-
media is under way. This new area, called mobile multimedia communications,
is expected to achieve unprecedented growth and worldwide commercial
success.
Current second-generation mobile communication systems support a number
of basic multimedia communication services. However, many technologically
demanding problems need to be solved before real-time mobile video com-
munications can be achieved. When such challenges are resolved, a wealth of
advanced services and applications will be available to the mobile user. This
book concentrates on three main challenges:

1. Higher coding e"ciency
2. Reduced computational complexity
3. Improved error resilience

Mobile video communications is an interdisciplinary subject. Complete sys-
tems are likely to draw together solutions from di(erent areas, such as video
source coding, channel coding, network design, and semiconductor design,
among others. This book concentrates on solutions based on video source
coding. In this context, the book adopts a motion-based approach, where ad-
vanced motion estimation techniques, reduced-complexity motion estimation
techniques, and motion-compensated error concealment techniques are used as
possible solutions to the three challenges, respectively.
The idea of this book originated in 1997, when the ,rst author was in
the early stages of his Ph.D. studies. As a newcomer to the ,eld, he started
consulting a number of books to introduce himself to the fundamentals and
standards of video source coding. He realized, however, that, for a beginner,
most of these books seemed too long and too theoretical, with no treatment of
some important practical and implementation issues. As he progressed further

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