Customer Reviews

Video Compression

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4 star:		(4)
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Definitely, an excellent introductory book on video compressionfundamentals. The book is very well written in a simple and clearway. It explains the basics of audio, image and video compression techniques, with a minimum of math. However, you won't find detailed implementation issues, and it has some mismatches in the examples and in the formulas used. If you know nothing or little about video compression and you don't want to mess with complicated math, this is the book you should read.

This book is definitely NOT for anyone above a beginner interested in the techniques of MPEG video compression. It is at least organized well, starting off with information theory, then JPEG and finally MPEG-1 & 2 compression. However, the book gets more vague as you work through it. I was mostly satisified with the sections on information theory, but I found it starting to lack with JPEG and finally very lacking and vague with MPEG compression. Phrases like "beyond the scope of this book" cropped up more and more. I am very familiar with communication theory so I could fill in many of the details, but beginners will have to take many of the concepts for granted.

With its large fonts and large spacing between lines, this book looks more for students who need an introduction to MPEG and JPEG. Nothing useful in here. Everything could be found on the web for free! Considering its price, this book is a very big and not to say expensive disappointment.

If you are looking for a basic understanding of the various video compression standards, then this book is for you. It starts off very basic and does not go any further than explaining the concepts of compression. There is virtually no math but the writer does do a good job explaining digital video terms and processes. Most of the book is dedicated to covering the Nyquist Theorem, Entorpy, JPEG, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. If you already have a good understanding of these subjects this book is not for you. If you are involved or interested in electronics and are looking to learn more about this subject this would be a good purchase. In few short years the VCR will be going the way of the 8-track and this is the technology that will be taking it?s place.

This book is superseded by my 2003 book "Digital Video Compression", ISBN 0071424873
Peter Symes
Author

I read the book in about 20 days, so I can say it has not been very heavy.
The writer has been very good to explain the subjects, so only a few times it happened to me to read twice a page to understand it (because of the complexity of the matter).
Before to read the book I didn't know anything about video compression. Now instead I can say even tougth I'm not able to write routines to handle compressed video streams, I could probably understand what those already existent do.
Definitely, like other people said, this book in good for beginners (like me). Anyway, now I think i will buy another one more detailed.
PS: I'm from Italy, I have only scholastic knowledge of English but I found this reading very fluent.

Gives a good basic understanding of the compression of mpeg and jpeg. Little or no discussion of avi, dv, mov. The highest level of math is a double summation.

Table of contents: (1) What is compression? (2) An intro to Images. talks about sampling (3) Entropy coding. discusses the meaning of entropy and mathimatical basis of it. I learned something here that my college professors could not get across. (4) Predictive coding (5) Transforms. The DCT is discussed here. This transform is used big time in jpeg and mpeg. (6) Quantization. The coefficients of the transforms must be clipped before transmitted. (7)JPEG. Walks you though all the steps on a single image. (8) Motion compensation. How to account for it and treat it. (9) MPEG-1, walks you through it (A) MPEG-2 (B) Audio compression (C) Closing thoughts

I would have still bought this book based on what I know about it now. Stay away from it if you're an expert.

Steve (6)