Very low bit rate video coding

Video conferencing, video telephony, tele-teaching, tele-medicine, surveillance, and monitoring systems are some of the video coding/compression applications that have attracted considerable interest in recent years. The burgeoning Internet has increased the need for transmitting (non-real-time) and/or streaming (real-time) video over a wide variety of different transmission channels connecting devices of varying storage and processing capacity. Stored movies or animations can now be downloaded and many reality-type interactive applications are also available via web-cams. In order to cater for devices with different storage and transmission bandwidth requirements, raw digital video data need to be coded at different bit rates with different timing complexity. In this book we discuss strategies on how we can encode a video at very low bit rate by keeping acceptable video quality using low computational time.