7 important video compression concepts that are more than 20 years old
2 Jun 2015
When were the key concepts of video compression developed? You may be surprised to learn that some date back to the 1950s.
The latest MPEG / ITU video compression standard, H.265 or HEVC, was published in 2013. HEVC is a significant technical achievement, but it's partly based on fundamental work carried out many decades ago.
An HEVC video codec includes the basic building blocks of:
- Prediction : create an estimate or prediction of a current block of video data
- Transform : convert a block of samples into a spatial frequency representation
- Entropy coding : encode video information into a compressed bitstream
Here are seven important research papers and patents dating back to the 1950s that helped to shape present day video coding technology.
Key:
1. “A Method for the Construction of Minimum Redundancy Codes”, D A Huffman, Proceedings of the I.R.E., September 1952
- Variable length binary codes for data compression.
2. “Transform coding of image difference signals”, M R Schroeder, US Patent 3679821, 1972
- Coding moving images using frame differencing, i.e. simple inter-frame prediction.
3. “Discrete Cosine Transform”, Ahmed, Natarajan and Rao, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Jan 1974
- The classic paper on the DCT, widely used in image and video compression.
4. “Generalized Kraft inequality and arithmetic coding”, J J Rissanen, IBM J. Res. Dev. 20, May 1976
- Arithmetic coding, a forerunner of H.264 and HEVC’s CABAC.
5. “Displacement measurement and its application in interframe image coding”, J R Jain and A K Jain, IEEE Trans. Communications, December 1981
- An early description of motion compensated prediction for video coding.
6. “Variable size block matching motion compensation with applications to video coding”, M H Chan, Y B Yu and A G Constantinides, IEE Proceedings Vol 137, August 1990
- Motion compensated prediction with variable size blocks.
7. “MPEG: A video compression standard for multimedia applications”, D Le Gall, Communications of the ACM, Vol 34 No 4, April 1991
- Bidirectional prediction as used in the MPEG-1 video compression standard.
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