Overview

Ever since the initial introduction of Sony s D-1 format, which digitally recorded an uncompressed standard definition (RGB) component video in 1983, the research and development efforts in digital video coding (compression) have been actively pursued. Apple released the first commercial version of QuickTime video for streaming and playback in 1991, and this set a fast pace for international standardization efforts for consumer digital video. Owing to the much larger amount of data (in bits per second, see Eq. (5.1)) generated by raw digital video, video coding (i.e., compression) becomes critically needed. More specifically, many types of video coding standard are now available to serve digital video playback, storage in CD or DVD, and broadcasting or streaming over the Internet. Digital videos are captured in two different forms: interlaced scan and progressive scan. Interlaced scan, which is the format used by analog broadcast TV systems, records the image in alternating sets of even and odd lines, each set of odd or even lines being referred to as a field, and a consecutive pairing of even and odd fields is called a frame: see Figure 5.1(a). A progressive scanning digital video records each frame as distinct, both fields being identical. Thus interlaced video captures twice as many fields per second as progressive video does when both operate at the same number of frames per second:

where W denotes the width (in pixels) of the video frame, H denotes the height of the video frame (in pixels), D