Last update: 2011/08/21
More video compression has comes after MPEG-1 Video, MPEG-2 Video and MPEG-4 Visual.
During the development of MPEG-4, several liaison statements were sent to ITU-T suggesting to work together on the new MPEG-4 Visual standard and even on the MPEG-4 Audio standard, specifically on the speech coding part. No response was received to these offers and MPEG continued the development of MPEG-4 alone.
For several years the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of Study Group 16 of ITU-T worked from the ground up on the development of new video compression technologies and achieved a breakthrough in compression performance around the turn of the century. Taking advantage from the departure of Thomas Sikora from MPEG, I appointed Gary Sullivan, VCEG rapporteur, as MPEG Video chair and together we managed to achieve a belated convergence of the ITU-T and MPEG efforts in the area of video coding.
At the July 2001 meeting MPEG reviewed the results of video compression viewing tests designed to assess whether there was evidence for advances in video coding technology that warranted the start of a new video coding project. With the positive result of the review a Call for Proposals was issued and in December the Joint Video Team (JVT) composed of MPEG and VCEG members was established.
With an intense schedule of meetings, the JVT managed to achieve the Final Draft International Standard stage of the new Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard in April 2003. AVC became part 10 of MPEG-4.
Following requests from the industry several profiles have been defined, some of which are
At the same meeting the JVT was established, MPEG started an investigation in video scalability that eventually led to the development of requirements for Scalable Video Coding (SVC). In a nutshell these imply that the encoded video stream should be structured into a base layer stream, decodable by a non-scalable decoder and one or more enhancement layer stream(s) decodable by a decoder conforming to the SVC standard. A Call for Proposals was issued and this work item, too, was entrusted to the JVT even though the SVC standard can actually work on top of any base layer video coding standard.
SVC offers a high degree of flexibility in terms of scalability dimensions, e.g. it supports various temporal/spatial resolutions, Signal-to-Noise (SNR)/fidelity levels and global/local Region of Interest (ROI) access). SVC performs significantly better and is much more flexible in terms of number of layers and combination of scalable modes than the scalable version of MPEG-2 Video and MPEG-4 Visual, while the penalty in compression performance, as compared to single-layer coding, is almost negligible.
