Digital Video Concepts, Methods, and Metrics

Digital Video Concepts, Methods and Metrics: Quality, Compression, Performance and Power Trade-off Analysis is a concise reference for professionals in a wide range of applications and vocations. It focuses on giving the reader mastery over the concepts, methods and metrics of digital video coding, so that readers have sufficient understanding to choose and tune coding parameters for optimum results that would suit their particular needs for quality, compression, speed and power. The practical aspects are many: Uploading video to the Internet is only the beginning of a trend where a consumer controls video quality and speed by trading off various other factors. Emerging applications such as video e-mail or open source applications for private party content generation, editing and archiving, and cloud asset management would give further control to the end-user. Digital video is frequently compressed and coded for easier storage and transmission. This process involves visual quality loss due to typical data compression techniques and requires use of powerful computing systems. A careful balance between the amount of compression, the visual quality loss and the coding speed is necessary to keep the total system cost down, while delivering a good user experience for various video applications. At the same time, power consumption optimizations are also essential to get the job done on inexpensive consumer platforms. While trade-offs can be made among these factors, to better understand the scope of the trade-off a comprehensive set of engineering principles, strategies, methodologies and metrics is not yet available. This book addresses this shortfall with an explanatory approach, exposing readers to methods of how to differentiate between two video coding solutions, and thereby shape the reader s perception. For example, an informed video codec user may choose to take the advantages offered by Intel Quick Sync Video compared to competitors.