3A History of Video Coding and Video Coding Standards
3.1 Introduction
The concept of sending video images to a remote location has captured the human imagination for centuries. The first demonstration of television in 1926 by the Scotsman John Logie Baird1 led to the realisation of this concept over analogue communication channels. Analogue TV systems make use of a simple form of compression or information reduction to fit higher‐resolution visual images into limited transmission bandwidths.
The emergence of digital video in the 1990s was made possible by compression techniques developed in the preceding decades. Even though the earliest videophones and consumer digital video formats were limited to very low‐resolution images of 352 × 288 pixels or smaller, the amount of information required to store and transmit moving video was too great for the available transmission channels and storage media. Video coding or compression was an integral part of these early digital applications, and it has remained central to each further development in video technology since 1990.
By the early 1990s, many of the key concepts required for efficient video compression had been developed. From the 1970s onwards, industry experts recognised that video compression and digital video had the potential to revolutionise the television industry. Efficient compression would make it possible to transmit many more digital channels in the bandwidth occupied by the older analogue TV channels.
The development ...
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