Recommended book about compression algorithms?

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Hello everyone,
I've been lurking for a few weeks now in the forum since I have taken an interest in the workings of how lossy data compression works and I was wondering if someone could recommend a good, fairly technical book about video compression?

I am an EE major so I understand things like how the basic transoforms work but I have no background in compression at all. I'd like something that covers things like Huffman coding, motion vectors, quantizers, etc. Ideally, I'd like something that covers wavelets too since I've been curious about how they work but they're not covered in my EE curriculum. It would be really cool if the book had some Matlab or C code for demos or something.

I'd like something that I could pick up from Amazon, so if anyone has good suggestions I'd very much like to hear them.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

(PS: I hope this is the right forum for this)

[unmei]

welcome to the forum. this is sure the right place to ask :) If you find a good book don't forget to post about it here. I would love to buy it as well, but i fear you will have a hard time finding a book that covers multiple principles at once in a useful way. For mpeg codecs you might find enlightening books from the comittee itself. But for everything else, the competition factor might be too high, they are tempted to write the code and sell the program only instead of selling books about the meat itself :(

For the small bits you often find in books you're better off searching the web than buying 12 books to get all the algos needed to write a single codec :)

Well, like i said, if you find that one not yet seen all-in-one killer book, post its ISBN or author/name!

[MfA]

Im cheap, so if I want something on paper I usually just get whatever the library has.

Looking at the book section on datacompression.info "Data Compression: The Complete Reference" and "Introduction to Data Compression" sound most up your ally.

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Originally posted by MfA
Im cheap, so if I want something on paper I usually just get whatever the library has.

Looking at the book section on datacompression.info "Data Compression: The Complete Reference" and "Introduction to Data Compression" sound most up your ally.

Good idea, I just checked and the Intro to Data Compression book is available in the engineering library. :)

Thanks for the recommendations!

[FastMike]

My suggestion is do what I did, check your local library. Borrowing books is more efficient (read: free) than buying books on Amazon.

I was in your same boat. Here are some suggestions:

This book has a lot of information and is easy to read:
Digital video and HDTV : algorithms and interfaces / Charles Poynton.

See if you can get ahold of these books:

Video codec design : developing image and video compression systems
Iain E.G. Richardson
Haskell, Barry G. Digital video : an introduction to MPEG-2
Benoit, Hervé. Digital television : MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and principles of
the DVB system

Feel free to PM if you have any questions.

[munkyboy]

I just stopped by my local bookstore this morning and found this book:
Digital Video Compression by Peter Symes
ISBN: 0071424873

It covers motion compensation, quant matrices, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, some audio stuff, and lots of algorithms. It looks good. I'm putting in an amazon order today. I'll post back here with a review.

btw, it was published October 2, 2003. so it's fairly recent. In this space, stuff get's outdated pretty quickly... :)

munky