Multimedia Representation Standards

Abstract

The primary purpose of standardization in the area of multimedia communication systems is to guarantee interoperability between devices and representation formats. Wide acceptance of a standard will help to achieve product life cycles of reasonable duration, and hence will also contribute to the availability of products at reasonable cost. For this, it is important that standards are open, which means that anybody has full access to all background information about technology implemented in the standard, and is allowed to use them by fair conditions. Compliance with standards must be strongly postulated, but it is often possible to further improve the efficiency within the framework of an existing standard, e.g. by optimizing encoders. Standards have to be extended when new application areas emerge, or when progress of technology allows significant improvement. In such cases, it should be targeted to retain compatibility with previous versions. In the design of a complex multimedia communication system, it is necessary to observe definitions made by many different standards e.g. from the domains of networking and transmission, source representation, coding and display technology. It is beyond the scope of this book to give a complete overview about this field. Moreover, it is shown how the methods introduced in previous chapters are implemented in the multimedia coding and content description standards of the International Standardization Organization (ISO/IEC) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).