Video coding standards for multimedia: JPEG, H.261, MPEG

Includes brief descriptions and explanations of three of the most important standards relevant to multimedia today-JPEG for still images, H.261 for conversational services and MPEG for storage and broadcast applications. They are presented in order of increasing complexity though this is not in accordance with the chronological order of completion. It should be noted that these standards effectively specify only the syntax and semantics of a coded representation such that a decoder can interpret it and reconstruct what the encoder intended. Many coder aspects are deliberately left open and different designs will produce different representations and different decoded results when fed with the same input pictures.<>