Introduction
Since 1997, the ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group
(VCEG) has been working on a new video coding standard
with the internal denomination H.26L. In late 2001, the Moving
Picture Expert Group (MPEG) and VCEG decided to
work together as a Joint Video Team (JVT), and to create a
single technical design called H.264/AVC [1]1, [2]. The standard
text has been approved by ITU-T SG16 as Recommendation
H.264 in May 2003 and by ISO/IEC as International
Standard 14496-10 (MPEG-4 part 10) Advanced
Video Coding (AVC) in July 2003. The primary goals of
H.264/AVC are improved coding efficiency and improved
network adaptation. The syntax of H.264/AVC typically permits
a significant reduction in bit-rate [3] compared to all
previous standards such as ITU-T Rec. H.263 [4] and
ISO/IEC JTC 1 MPEG-4 Visual [5] at the same quality level.
The demand for fast and location-independent access to
multimedia services offered on today's Internet is steadily
increasing. Hence, most current and future cellular networks,
like GSM-GPRS, UMTS, or CDMA-2000, contain a
variety of packet-oriented transmission modes allowing
transport of practically any type of IP-based traffic to and
from mobile terminals, thus providing users with a simple
and flexible transport interface. The third generation partnership
project (3GPP) has selected several multimedia
codecs for the inclusion into its multimedia specifications [6].
To provide basic video service in the first release of the 3G
wireless systems, baseline H.263 as a mandatory codec and
the MPEG-4 visual simple profile as an optional codec have
been integrated. The choice was based on the manageable
complexity of the encoding and decoding process as well as
on the maturity and simplicity of the design.