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 insightful observations and comments about motion estimation topic from general and fundamental perspectives. This chapter will certainly provide a 'playground' in triggering new research ideas for the readers along the way. 4. Part II and IV that cover image and video compression standards, respectively, are written by the second author, who has been regularly and actively participating international MPEG standards meetings for years. With his actual involvement of the standardization activities, these two parts are written in a concise, clear and authoritative way that greatly helps the readers to understand the very 'dry' materials from the standards specifications otherwise. In Part II, advanced and proprietary image coding methods, such as vector quantization and fractal coding, are also included to let the users have her/his choice in building up more appreciation about image compression, as desired. 5. At the end of each chapter, there are two important sections; namely, Summary and Exercises. I found that they are very useful in enhancing reader's understanding about the respective topics discussed. Note that the questions in the subject of image and video compression are not necessarily always imposed in quantitative and computational style. In fact, perspective and philosophical quizzes could often be derived from long hours of research and insightful observations. Particularly, in the standards, readers could have more insights about 'why' and 'how' the standards are set in such way, rather than just 'what'. In conclusion, I must congratulate the authors on their wonderful achievement in publishing such excellent book. Overall, the book is highly organized, well balanced and clearly written with ample illustrations by using figures and tables. The mathematical equations are clear, accurate, and with consistent notations used throughout the entire book. A set of core references are conveniently provided at the end of each chapter, which is better than encyclopaedia style of long citations that might be found in other books, to help readers in focusing the studies of fundamentals. The book indeed establishes its authority on simultaneously presenting solid fundamentals of image and video compression and disseminating difficult materials of compression standards. I found that this is truly an outstanding graduate-level textbook. It can be also served as a valuable reference book to researchers from academia and engineers from industry. (End)