Digital Compression for Multimedia: Principles & Standards

Effective digital compression--whether image, voice, or video data--is an essential part of telecommunications and the Internet. Digital Compression for Multimedia: Principles & Standards is a one-volume guide to the theory and standards behind today's digital compression. Written as a textbook and including plenty of mathematical expertise, this book is appropriate for a college course or as a reference for expert designers who are using the latest in digital compression.

The authors define data compression and its mathematical foundations and include performance measures of how effective a given compression scheme is. Illustrations from the world of file compression (using Huffman coding, a popular compression scheme) escort readers through basic compression methods. The book also introduces other techniques, such as quantization and predictive coding, and explains today's voice-coding standards.

The latter half of the book does an excellent job of explaining popular standards for compressing data, such as the JPEG standard for images and the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards for video compression. (The authors are on top of new developments, such as emerging standards for multimedia video conferencing and video compression.) Useful appendices outline the important algorithms for compression, and an in-depth bibliography lists sources for research in compression. These features make this book a definitive guide for those who need to know the latest in digital compression technology. --Richard V. Dragan