Data compression in multimedia computing — principles and techniques

Integrated multimedia systems process text, graphics, and other discrete media as well as digital audio, and video data. Considerable amounts of graphics, audio and video data in their uncompressed form, especially moving pictures, require storage and digital network capacities that will not be available in the near future. Nevertheless, local, as well as networked, multimedia applications and systems have become realities. In order to cope with these storage and communication requirements in such integrated multimedia systems, compression technology is essential. This papers starts with a brief motivation of the need for compression and subsequently states the essential requirements for these techniques in the scope of multimedia systems and applications. As most of these techniques apply the same principles, namely, the source, entropy, and hybrid coding fundamentals, these are explained in detail. Based on a general framework of the steps encountered in a compression system — data preparation, processing, quantization, and entropy coding — this paper outlines details about the techniques developed by CCITT (H.261, i.e., px64), in the ISO/IEC (JPEG, MPEG) standardization bodies and the proprietary DVI system.