Communicating Pictures: A Course in Image and Video Coding

Communicating Pictures starts with a unique historical perspective of the role of images in communications and then builds on this to explain the applications and requirements of a modern video coding system. It draws on the author’s extensive academic and professional experience of signal processing and video coding to deliver a text that is algorithmically rigorous, yet accessible, relevant to modern standards, and practical. It offers a thorough grounding in visual perception, and demonstrates how modern image and video compression methods can be designed in order to meet the rate-quality performance levels demanded by today’s applications, networks and users. With this book you will learn:

Practical issues when implementing a codec, such as picture boundary extension and complexity reduction, with particular emphasis on efficient algorithms for transforms, motion estimators and error resilience
Conflicts between conventional video compression, based on variable length coding and spatiotemporal prediction, and the requirements for error resilient transmission
How to assess the quality of coded images and video content, both through subjective trials and by using perceptually optimised objective metrics
Features, operation and performance of the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard