Abstract
Access to hundreds of high resolution live TV channels and millions of YouTube videos is now the norm. Do you ever hit ‘pause’ to wonder how this came about?
What we now take for granted has actually developed over the last 50 years. Whilst the improvements in digital transmission speeds and storage have helped considerably, a fundamental enabler to the success of the modern video empowered world is “Digital Video Compression”.
This Presidential address will overview the highlights and evolution of video compression engineering, starting with the relative simple schemes of the late 1970’s through to latest sophisticated techniques in common use today.
As with most areas of engineering, improved understanding in combination with increased technical capability has enabled a progression of significant improvements.
A standard HD moving picture generates more than 1Gb/s in its raw form. With todays sophisticated compression techniques such high quality pictures can easily be viewed over a link bandwidth of only 2Mb/s which demands a bit rate compression of more than 500:1.
Such compression ratios are truly amazing and for most of time they are totally invisible to the viewer. The engineering involved has rarely been overviewed. This address will look at the past, present and give a look to the future of this previously unseen technology
