Basic Video Compression Techniques

A video can be viewed as a sequence of images stacked in the temporal dimension. Since the frame rate of the video is often relatively high, the contents of consecutive frames are usually similar. In other words, video has temporal redundancy. All digital video compression algorithms (including H.264 and H.265) adopt the so-called motion compensation based video compression technique to exploit temporal redundancy. In this chapter the fundamentals of motion compensation based video compression are introduced. We cover sufficient details of H.261, followed by a brief discussion on H.263. These form the foundation for all modern video compression standards.