A practical course in digital video communications based on MATLAB

The outline of new course in video coding is presented in which the basic concepts are reinforced by way of a series of graded MATLAB exercises. Following a brief overview of the motion-compensated discrete cosine transform (DCT) encoder, a number of exercises are described in which the student obtains an understanding of image correlations and entropy and the concepts involved in predictive encoding. The data compaction properties of the discrete cosine transform are then illustrated together with interframe motion-estimation and motion-compensated prediction. All aspects of the evolving video encoder are then integrated by way of a simplified encoder syntax that is based upon the standard Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) syntax. This allows students to exchange digital bit-streams and decode image sequences that have been encoded by fellow students. Advanced topics such as fast motion estimation techniques, error resilience, and other coding approaches are briefly discussed.