1.

Introduction

JPEG, Motion JPEG and MPEG are three well-used acronyms used to describe different types of image
compression format. But what do they mean, and why are they so relevant to today’s rapidly expanding
surveillance market? This White Paper describes the differences, and aims to provide a few answers as to why
they are so important and for which surveillance applications they are suitable.

When designing a networked digital surveillance application, developers need to initially consider the following
factors:

> Is a still picture or a video sequence required?

> What is the available network bandwidth?

> What image degradation is allowed due to compression – so called artifacts?

> What is the budget for the system?

When an ordinary analog video sequence is digitized according to the standard CCIR 601, it can consume as
much as 165 Mbps, which is 165 million bits every second. With most surveillance applications infrequently
having to share the network with other data intensive applications, this is very rarely the bandwidth available.
To circumvent this problem, a series of techniques – called picture and video compression techniques – have
been derived to reduce this high bit-rate. Their ability to perform this task is quantified by the compression
ratio. The higher the compression ratio is, the smaller is the bandwidth consumption. However, there is a price
to pay for this compression: increasing compression causes an increasing degradation of the image. This is
called artifacts.

1.1 VIDEO COMPRESSION STANDARDS

ITU-T and ISO/IEC these are the main two international organizations which decides the standards for
video compressions. ISO/IEC MPEG standard includes MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-4 Part 10
(AVC), MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and M-JPEG. ITU-I VCEG standard includes H.26x series, H.261, H.263, and
H.264. This new generation gives the new requirements of future applications with the different video
coding standard.

1. Motion JPEG

A digital video sequence can be represented as a series of JPEG pictures. This JPEG pictures are known as
frames. Motion JPEG is also known as MJPEG. The advantages given by Motion JPEG pictures are that it
gives flexibility for quality as well as for compression ratio. The main disadvantage of Motion JPEG is that
since it uses only a series of still pictures it makes no use of video compression techniques. The result is, it
gives slightly lower compression ratio for video sequences.

2. Motion JPEG 2000

It can also be used to represent a video sequence. The advantages are same as JPEG 2000, i.e., a slightly
better compression ratio compared to JPEG. The major disadvantage of Motion JPEG 2000 is that it is
some somewhat complex. Since it is a still picture compression technique it doesn’t take any advantages of
the video sequence compression. It also gives a lower compression ration compared to real video
compression techniques.
3.MPEG-1

The first public standard of the MPEG committee was the MPEG-1. MPEG-1 video compression includes
techniques for efficient coding of a video sequence. This standard focuses on bit stream. It uses for storing
data on CDs. In this the compression ratio is important than the picture quality. In MPEG-1 only the new
parts of the video sequence is identified and coded. This is done while transmission of video sequence. This
process has reduce the bandwidth of the signal to large extent.

4. MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is the ―Generic Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio‖. The MPEG-2 standard is
used for TV transmission and other applications of high data rates. It gives very high picture quality. This is
a compatible extension of MPEG-1 standard means MPEG-2 decoder can decode MPEG1 data streams.
Combining of multiple audio, video and private data streams into a single multiplexed stream is specify by
MPEG-2 standard. It supports wide range of broad cast, telecommunication and storage application. It
enhances the better video quality at same bit rate. Using this techniques the DVD movies are compressed.
4. MPEG-4 The main feature of MPEG-4 is that it gives the support of lower bandwidth application as well
as extremely high quality and unlimited bandwidth application. The one example of it is studio movies. The
basic idea of this is not only related to video coding but it involves fully encoding only key frames through
JPEG algorithm where minimal information is sent between every four to five frames. Compression ratio
achieved by this is approximately 100:1.This standard encoder is very complex and places very heavy
computational load for motion estimation whereas decoding is comparatively simple which can done using
low cost decoder chips. The basic idea is to detect motion from frame to frame in temporal directions and
then use DCT to organize redundancies. The DCT is done on 8*8 block and motion prediction is done on
luminance (Y) of 16*16 blocks. The DCT coefficients are end up with zero. The quantization can change
for every macro block, which is 16*16 of Y and the corresponding 8*8 in both U and V. The DCT
coefficients, motion vectors and quantization parameters are Huffman coded using fixed tables. The motion
vectors and the DCT components are DPCM coded.

5. H.261

H.261 is a motion compression algorithm used for motion video compression task. It allows for use with
communication channels that are multiples of 64 kbps (P=1, 2, 3…30). So it is called as P x 64. H.261
coding is based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform). The main elements of the H.261 source coder are
prediction, block transformation (spatial to frequency domain translation), quantization, and entropy
coding. Whereas decoder requires prediction, motion compensation, loop filtering etc. The loop filter is
applied for predicting data to reduce errors in inter frame coding. The H.261 source code operates on
noninterlaced pictures occurring approximately 29.97 times per seconds. The tolerance is about ±50 ppm.
In this technique pictures are coded as luminance and two color difference components (Y, Cb and Cr). It
gives large improvement in video quality but requires extra processing power. When H.261 controller
performs the compression, the decisions are made block-by-block basis not by picture-by-picture basis.

6. H.263

H.263 is structure wise similar to the H.261 and is backward compatible. H.263 gives superior picture
quality than H.261 at bandwidth under 1000 kbps. It uses half pixel technology which gives greatly
improved images. For low resolution images also half pixel techniques gives better matches. The features of
H.263 are 3-D variable length coding of DCT coefficients, median motion vector prediction, bidirectional
prediction, arithmetic entropy coding.
 COMPARISON OF VIDEO COMPRESSION STANDARDS All MPEG and H.26X standards are back
compatible. The comparisons between all standards is given in table 1

TABLE 1 COMPARISON OF VIDEO COMPRESSION STANDARDS

Standard Applications Bit

Motion JPEG Still image compression Variable
MJPEG 2000 Improved still image compression Variable
MPEG-1 Video on digital storage media (CD- 1.5Mb/s
ROM)
MPEG-2 Digital Television 2-20 Mb/s
MPEG-4 Object-based coding, synthetic content, Variable
interactivity
H.261 Video conferencing over ISDN P x 64 kb/s
H.263 Video telephony over PSTN 33.6kb/s
H.264 Improved video compression 10’s to 100’s kb/s

1.2 VIDEO COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES

JPEG

The JPEG standard, ISO/IEC 10918, is the single most widespread picture compression format of today. It
offers the flexibility to either select high picture quality with fairly high compression ratio or to get a very
high compression ratio at the expense of a reasonable lower picture quality. Systems, such as cameras and
viewers, can be made inexpensive due to the low complexity of the technique. The artifacts show the
“blockiness” as seen in Figure 1. The blockiness appears when the compression ratio is pushed too high. In
normal use, a JPEG compressed picture shows no visual difference to the original uncompressed picture.
JPEG image compression contains a series of advanced techniques. The main one that does the real image
compression is the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) followed by a quantization that removes the
redundant information (the “invisible” parts).
Motion JPEG

A digital video sequence can be represented as a series of JPEG pictures. The advantages are the same as
with single still JPEG pictures – flexibility both in terms of quality and compression ratio. The main
disadvantage of Motion JPEG (a.k.a. MJPEG) is that since it uses only a series of still pictures it makes no
use of video compression techniques. The result is a lower compression ratio for video sequences compared
to “real” video compression techniques like MPEG. The benefit is its robustness with no dependency
between the frames, which means that, for example, even if one frame is dropped during transfer, the rest of
the video will be un-affected.

JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000 was created as the follow-up to the successful JPEG compression, with better compression
ratios. The basis was to incorporate new advances in picture compression research into an international
standard. Instead of the DCT transformation, JPEG 2000, ISO/IEC 15444, uses the Wavelet transformation.
The advantage of JPEG 2000 is that the blockiness of JPEG is removed, but replaced with a more overall
fuzzy picture, as can be seen in Figure 2.

Whether this fuzziness of JPEG 2000 is preferred compared to the “blockiness” of JPEG is a matter of
personal preference. Regardless, JPEG 2000 never took off for surveillance applications and is still not
widely supported in web browsers either.

Motion JPEG 2000

As with JPEG and Motion JPEG, JPEG 2000 can also be used to represent a video sequence. The
advantages are equal to JPEG 2000, i.e., a slightly better compression ratio compared to JPEG but at the
price of complexity. The disadvantage reassembles that of Motion JPEG. Since it is a still picture
compression technique it does not take any advantage of the video sequence compression. This results in a
lower compression ration compared to real video compression techniques. The viewing experience if a
video stream in Motion JPEG 2000 is generally considered not as good as a Motion JPEG stream, and
Motion JPEG 2000 has never been any success as a video compression technique.

H.261/H.263

The H.261 and H.263 are not International Standards but only Recommendations of the ITU. They are both
based on the same technique as the MPEG standards and can be seen as simplified versions of MPEG video
compression. They were originally designed for video-conferencing over telephone lines, i.e. low
bandwidth. However, it is a bit contradictory that they lack some of the more advanced MPEG techniques
to really provide efficient bandwidth use. The conclusion is therefore that H.261 and H.263 are not suitable
for usage in general digital video coding.

MPEG-1 The first public standard of the MPEG committee was the MPEG-1, ISO/IEC 11172, which first
parts were released in 1993. MPEG-1 video compression is based upon the same technique that is used in
JPEG. In addition to that it also includes techniques for efficient coding of a video sequence

Consider the video sequence displayed in Figure 3. The picture to the left is the first picture in the sequence
followed by the picture in the middle and then the picture to the right. When displayed, the video sequence
shows a man running from right to left with a house that stands still. In Motion JPEG/Motion JPEG 2000
each picture in the sequence is coded as a separate unique picture resulting in the same sequence as the
original one. In MPEG video only the new parts of the video sequence is included together with
information of the moving parts. The video sequence of Figure 3 will then appear as in Figure 4. But this is
only true during the transmission of the video sequence to limit the bandwidth consumption. When
displayed it appears as the original video sequence again.

MPEG-1 is focused on bit-streams of about 1.5 Mbps and originally for storage of digital video on CDs.
The focus is on compression ratio rather than picture quality. It can be considered as traditional VCR
quality but digital instead. It is important to note that the MPEG-1 standard, as well as MPEG-2, MPEG-4
and H.264 that are described below, defines the syntax of an encoded video stream together with the
method of decoding this bitstream. Thus, only the decoder is actually standardized. An MPEG encoder can
be implemented in different way and a vendor may choose to implement only a subset of the syntax,
providing it provides a bitstream that is compliant with the standard. This allows for optimization of the
technology and for reducing complexity in implementations. However, it also means that there are no
guarantees for quality – different vendors implement MPEG encoders that produce video streams that differ
in quality.

MPEG-2

The MPEG-2 project focused on extending the compression technique of MPEG-1 to cover larger pictures
and higher quality at the expense of a higher bandwidth usage. MPEG-2, ISO/IEC 13818, also provides
more advanced techniques to enhance the video quality at the same bit-rate. The expense is the need for far
more complex equipment. As a note, DVD movies are compressed using the techniques of MPEG-2.

MPEG-3

The next version of the MPEG standard, MPEG-3 was designed to handle HDTV, however, it was
discovered that the MPEG-2 standard could be slightly modified and then achieve the same results as the
planned MPEG-3 standard. Consequently, the work on MPEG-3 was discontinued.

MPEG-4

The next generation of MPEG, MPEG-4, is based upon the same technique as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Once
again, the new standard focused on new applications. The most important new features of MPEG-4,
ISO/IEC 14496, concerning video compression are the support of even lower bandwidth consuming
applications, e.g. mobile devices like cell phones, and on the other hand applications with extremely high
quality and almost unlimited bandwidth. In general the MPEG-4 standard is a lot wider than the previous
standards. It also allows for any frame rate, while MPEG-2 was locked to 25 frames per second in PAL and
30 frames per second in NTSC. When “MPEG-4,” is mentioned in surveillance applications today it is
usually MPEG-4 part 2 that is referred to. This is the “classic” MPEG-4 video streaming standard, a.k.a.
MPEG-4 Visual. Some network video streaming systems specify support for “MPEG-4 short header,”
which is an H.263 video stream encapsulated with MPEG-4 video stream headers. MPEG-4 short header
does not take advantage of any of the additional tools specified in the MPEG-4 standard, which gives a
lower quality level than both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 at a given bit-rate.

H.264

H.264 is the latest generation standard for video encoding. This initiative has many goals. It should provide
good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards and with better error robustness –
or better video quality at an unchanged but rate. The standard is further designed to give lower latency as
well as better quality for higher latency. In addition, all these improvements compared to previous standards
were to come without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or
expensive to build applications and systems. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow
the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications: for both low and high bit rates, for low and high
resolution video, and with high and low demands on latency. Indeed, a number of applications with
different requirements have been identified for H.264: > Entertainment video including broadcast, satellite,
cable, DVD, etc (1-10 Mbps, high latency) > Telecom services ( Streaming services (low bit-rate, high
latency) > And others As a note, DVD players for high-definition DVD formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-
ray support movies encoded with H.264.

MPEG-7
MPEG-7 is a different kind of standard as it is a multimedia content description standard, and does not deal
with the actual encoding of moving pictures and audio. With MPEG-7, the content of the video (or any
other multimedia) is described and associated with the content itself, for example to allow fast and efficient
searching in the material. MPEG-7 uses XML to store metadata, and it can be attached to a timecode in
order to tag particular events in a stream. Although MPEG-7 is independent of the actual encoding
technique of the multimedia, the representation that is defined within MPEG-4, i.e. the representation of
audio-visual data in terms of objects, is very well suited to the MPEG-7 standard. MPEG-7 is relevant for
video surveillance since it could be used for example to tag the contents and events of video streams for
more intelligent processing in video management software or video analytics applications.

MPEG-21

MPEG-21 is a standard that defines means of sharing digital rights, permissions, and restrictions for digital
content. MPEG-21 is an XML-based standard, and is developed to counter illegitimate distribution of
digital content. MPEG-21 is not particularly relevant for video surveillance situations. Amongst others.