H.261 and MPEG1-a comparison

This paper is motivated by the fact that the USA and Europe have chosen different approaches for implementing video data compression for applications such as video conferencing. Primarily, the former uses JPEG and MPEG, the latter uses H.261, also known as p*64. Within the framework of this paper, a thorough introduction into both techniques is provided. This paper focuses on the video coding part. The starting point is the analysis of the baseline method of JPEG on which the intra-frame coding mode for both H.261 and MPEG1 (first phase of MPEG) is based. By studying the CCITT (now, ITU-TS-International Telecommunications Union, Teleconferencing Sector) recommendation H.261, motion-compensated prediction is presented. Motion-compensated interpolation is explained discussing the ISO standard MPEG1. Preliminary results of intermediate tests are presented. For running tests, public domain codecs for H.261 and MPEG1 provided by Stanford University are used