TABLE OF CONTENTS The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was started in 1988 as a working group within ISO/IEC with the aim of defining standards for the digital compression of audio-visual signals. MPEG-1 was the first standard, finalized by MPEG in 1993 as ISO/IEC 11172. The video part, Part 2, of the MPEG-1 standard was developed to operate principally from storage media offering a continuous transfer rate of about 1.5 Mbps [3]. The MPEG-1 video coding is a generic standard which supports a very wide range of applications profiles with a large diversity of input parameters to be specified by the users. The MPEG-2 video coding, Part 2 of ISO/IEC 13818 standard [5], further extends the capabilities of MPEG-1 video coding and is capable of coding standard-definition television (SDTV) at bitrates from about 3 15 Mbps and high-definition television (HDTV) at 15 30 Mbps. As for MPEG-1 video, which is adopted as the video CD storage format, MPEG-2 video also specifies the format of movies and other programs that are distributed on DVDs and similar disks. Moreover, MPEG-2 video also specifies the format of the digital television signals that are broadcast by terrestrial (over-the-air), cable, and direct broadcast satellite TV systems.
The MPEG-1 video algorithm was developed in parallel with JPEG and H.261 standardization activities, therefore the basic MPEG-1 (as well as the MPEG-2) video coding technique is very similar to the H.261 hybrid DCT/DPCM block-based scheme, which includes macro-block structure, motion compensation, and conditional...
