A tutorial on image/video coding standards

The field of image and video compression has gone through rapid growth during the past thirty years, leading to various coding standards. The main goal of continuous efforts on image/video coding standardization is to achieve low bit rate for data storage and transmission, while maintaining acceptable distortion. In this paper, various developmental stages of image and video compression standards are reviewed, including JPEG and JPEG 2000 image standards, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and the latest international video standard HEVC as well as Chinese video coding standard AVS. Key features and major applications of the standards will be briefly introduced and the compression performance of the standards at each stage will be compared and discussed.