Page 11 - Video Coding for Mobile Communications Efficiency, Complexity, and Resilience

xiv Preface

in his studies, the ,rst author also realized that the areas of coding e"ciency,
computational complexity, and error resilience are usually treated separately.
Thus, he always wished there was a book that provided a quick, easy, and
practical introduction to the fundamentals and standards of video source coding
and that brought together the areas of coding e"ciency, computational com-
plexity, and error resilience in a single volume. This is exactly the purpose of
this book.

Structure of the Book

The book consists of 10 chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to mo-
bile video communications. It starts by discussing the main motivations and
applications of mobile video communications. It then brie2y introduces the
challenges of higher coding e"ciency, reduced computational complexity, and
error resilience. The chapter then discusses some possible motion-based solu-
tions. The remaining chapters of the book are organized into four parts. The
,rst part introduces the reader to video coding, whereas the remaining three
parts are devoted to the three challenges of coding e"ciency, computational
complexity, and error resilience.
Part I gives an introduction to video coding. It contains two chapters. Chap-
ter 2 introduces some of the fundamentals of video source coding. It starts by
giving some basic de,nitions and then covers both analog, and digital video
along with some basic video coding techniques. It also presents the perfor-
mance measures and the test sequences that will be used throughout the book.
It then reviews both intraframe and interframe video coding methods.
Chapter 3 provides a brief introduction to video coding standards. Partic-
ular emphasis is given to the most recent standards, such as H.263 (and its
extensions H.263+ and H.263++) and MPEG-4.
Part II concentrates on coding e"ciency. It contains three chapters. Chap-
ter 4 covers some basic motion estimation methods. It starts by introducing
some of the fundamentals of motion estimation. It then reviews some ba-
sic motion estimation methods, with particular emphasis on the widely used
block-matching methods. The chapter then presents the results of a compar-
ative study between the di(erent methods. The chapter also investigates the
e"ciency of motion estimation at very low bit rates, typical of mobile video
communications. The aim is to decide if the added complexity of this process
is justi,able, in terms of an improved coding e"ciency, at such bit rates.
Chapter 5 investigates the performance of the more advanced warping-based
motion estimation methods. The chapter starts by describing a general warping-
based motion estimation method. It then considers some important parameters,
such as the shape of the patches, the spatial transformation used, and the node