MPEG-1 audio real-time encoding system

MPEG technology is commonly used by multimedia equipment. We have developed an MPEG camera (Imaide et al. 1997; Asada et al. 1997) that compresses video and audio in real-time. The hardware or DSP has been used to encode/decode MPEG audio, one of the key technologies in MPEG, when real-time processing is required. However, as the MPEG camera is for consumer use, it needs to be compact and light. We have developed a software system with a system CPU to encode and decode the MPEG audio in real-time to satisfy the requirement of the entire camera system.