Recent advances in video compression: What’s next?

In the last two decades, there have been significant advances in video coding. Since the early 1990s, a series of video coding standards have been developed to satisfy the growing requirements of video applications. Among these, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is the most recent standard achieving high compression efficiency. The video compression research community has continued working on new advances that go beyond traditional video coding architectures. In this paper, we overview of some recent advances in video coding and their potential applications. We discuss work in distributed coding, texture-based methods, scalable coding, and multi-view video coding.

1. INTRODUCTION

Digital video is everywhere today with applications that include high definition television, video delivered and captured on mobile telephones and handheld devices (such as iPods). The problem is that video has huge storage and transmission bandwidth requirements. Even with the rapid increase in processor speeds, disc storage capacity and broadband network techniques, a concise representation of the video signal is required. Video compression algorithms are used to reduce the data rate of the video signal while maintaining video quality. A typical video coding system consists of an encoder and a decoder, which is referred to as a codec [1]. To ensure the inter-operability between different platforms and applications, standards have been developed for video compression.