Image and Video Compression for Multimedia Engineering

A book review of Image and Video Compression for Multimedia Engineering ¾ Fundamentals, Algorithms, and Standards, by Yun Q. Shi and Huifang Sun Image and video compression is one of the turnkey technologies, and often indispensable, to visual communication and multimedia engineering. I am very please to see such timely and outstanding book, which is jointly written by two internationally well-known scholars, one from academia and the other from industry, and also a veteran contributor in the MPEG standards arena. With much interests and admiration while reading this book, I would like to highlight my perspectives in reviewing the book as follows. 1. The entire book (with 480 pages in total) consists of twenty chapters and is properly divided into four parts. The logical ordering of these chapters and their sections is excellent with balanced treatment throughout. The book has its unique way in partitioning the vast material in this field that I can not find it in any other books. 2. The fundamental theories and concepts have been contained in the first part (i.e., the first 6 chapters). They are written in a systematically manner ¾ step-by-step, clearly and succinctly. This part lays a solid foundation for the remaining parts of the book. Together with Part III commented in the following, these two parts serve as the foundation of finalized image and video compression standards. 3. The topic of Motion Estimation covered in Part III is a special pre-requisite to video compression. This part is well-written and contains many updated research results. It not only clearly describes the block-matching methodology that has been adopted in all video coding standards, but also covers two intimately related techniques ¾ Pel Recursive and Optical Flow, in order to form a complete treatment and appreciation for the entire 2-D motion estimation methods. In particular, I found that the last chapter of this part (i.e., Chapter 14) is very unique and interesting. It offers insigh