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