Developments in Audio and Video Coding in MPEG

Audio and video compression offer opportunities to introduce new applications and improve the efficiency of existing applications. To compress speech, a dedicated state of the art speech codec, is usually more efficient than the moving picture experts group (MPEG) audio standards. MPEG developed the Unified Speech and Audio Codec (USAC) standard which can efficiently compress the entire spectrum of audio signals. This chapter describes compression factors needed to achieve the bitrates for audio and video. To achieve the high compression factors, MPEG video utilizes a wide variety of tools to reduce redundancy in the video signal. The chapter also provides an overview of video coding standards introduced by MPEG between 1992 and 2007 and summarizes the evolution of the main MPEG audio standards between 1992 and 2007. Spatial audio object coding (SAOC) provides an audio coding algorithm which allows the distribution of multiple individual audio objects within one stream.