Compression Books

I got this book since it is the only book on H.264 I know of.
There is a single chapter on H.264, chapter 6. The free
on-line papers from Richardson are mostly what is in that chapter.

There are plenty of H.264 overviews on the net for free
which cover the subject in greater depth which are more current.

I almost didn't get this book because some of the other reviews are pretty bad. I'm glad I got it!

This isn't a standard. So you won't find every table that's part of h.264, but you'll find enough that the standard will be accessible after you read this book. And given that the goal is conversational instead of documentary, Richardson has done a terrific job of simultaneously describing a host of relatively difficult concepts, explaining how they fit together, and explaining their places in the MPEG4 and H.264 standards.

This is probably not a first book on video compression; for that, you might try Digital Video Compression (with CD-ROM). If you get that other book, though, only read the first half. (The second half is absurdly dated and not very helpful.) I think it's reasonable to read the first half of that book, then this one, and then jump right into the standard itself (for whatever purposes you want to do that).

The book does not go deep into the H.264 standard.
It seems that it was supposed to be a review of MPEG-4, with H.264 added as an afterthought.
I expected the level of the Mitchell / Pennebaker classic book on MPEG, but was disappointed.

I like the book on overview of H.264 (because it is no worse than most of overview papers, even those in IEEE by H.264 chairs).

This is the first text book published on H.264. It has a nice overview of digital video compression techniques followed by chapters focusing on the specifics of each of the MPEG-4 and H.264 standards. Buying this book relays much of the same information but is more cost effective than buying each of the papers and articles on the subject from IEEE and others.

It appears that this book was rushed to publication in order to be first. Particularly in the chapter on H.264, there are many typos and incomplete figures. In some places, a new technical term is used without proper introduction. I look forward to a cleaner second edition in the future.

In my opinion, Fisher's book can serve as a very good tutorial to fractal image encoding. The first chapter, probably better known as the "SIGGRAPH '92 Course Notes", can be understand easily even by non-scientist and be used to code your own basic compression engine. The other chapters go more into detail and show how to develop your coder to a #1 compression engine. Unfortunately, you sometimes need to read between the math to get the necessary information. Anyway, after reading the book, I was able to create some nice code and to compress color images up to 1:25 ... 1:100 in seconds or minutes without problems !

You get the impression this would have been better if written in Russian! The man has no idea how to write and be understood( Yuval Fisher) and his own work shows it. To drag others down with him is a form of greatness! Your unique Associates ID is: thefractaltransl

Borrowed this book from from my instructor and saw that it was much better than any standard image processing coursebook to learn some ideas from...

If one wants to learn jpeg2000, he can look for some papers and source codes which are better than this book.
If one wants to learn theory of image coding, he can read some other books much better than this book.

This book is only for fools.

The author of this book is a genius. His work should be required reading for all. Definatly one of the great minds in our time.

This book is quite good but any potential buyer should know exactly why he would buy it and if it really matches his expectations. Indeed, this book is hardly a helper in implementing jpeg2000, but more a reference book for highly skilled image processing professionals/researchers. It is divided in two parts: the first part is about general image processing topics and provide some explanation about the choices made for jpeg2000. It is the "theorical" part. The second part is about jpeg2000 itself. The latter could have been much more practical and better directed to implementors. In fact, I was thinking of this book being able to clarify some aspects of the norm that are quite blur, but I find the way it is written, even for the second part, overly complicated and scientifically oriented, not "engineering" oriented. Most of the topics are better explained in the norm itself than in this book, even if the latter is much more detailed. Clearly there is room for another book on the topic but this time directed to implementors, with less theory, less scientific notations, are more, much more, real world examples working on real bit-streams.

Many video compression books start with a particular specification and then provide background to justify the decisions made in defining the specification. This book approaches video compression starting from scientific principles and building on those towards describing the decisions made in digital compression standards. It describes the history of common analog video formats and proceeds to a solid overview of the MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 digital video compression formats.

Many video compression books completely disregard or gloss over audio. This one includes audio compression with the same complete treatment given to video. The book covers MPEG layer 1-3 audio, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC, and Dolby AC-3.

This book is complete, has no obvious typos, is logically organized, and contains many useful diagrams.

This book covers a broad range of topics, some relevant to video and audio coding, some not (e.g. digital filters, Fourier transform, phase locked loop !). Key topics such as motion estimation and compensation are not clearly described. The information on the MPEG standards is disappointing, by my reckoning less than 1/3 of the book actually deals with MPEG. There is no mention of MP4 profiles/levels or MP4 systems.

The last 1/3 of the book serves as a good introduction to MPEG. All of the concepts and terminology definitions, can be found on the web, but it will take you days to find it all. This book is good if you want to save time looking thru useless web pages that may or may not be correct.

Worth the money? Depends on how valuable your time is.

The first 2/3's is mostly academic principles of sampling/transforms/compression. Engineering text book stuff.

Also, the book is very rough around the edges. Looks like a collection of stuff from different sources. The book jumps all over the place, and leaves things open ended at times.

This one is nice to know what "techNOlogies" might be used in CNXT video encoders. But, it is overpriced, just like CNXT chips... Buy Equator will be better.

The book did cover some fast implementation algorithms for certain compression standards. It is, somewhat, incomplete! It is not really for students to study principle of compression algorithms. The authors seem only know OLD H.263 or MPEG compression algorithms. Not recommended for who wants to learn new tricks.

Althoug the topics covered in this book are very essential and basic for those who are interested in source coding, but the unsmooth way of presenting the basics and advanced ideas makes the reading of the book a little bit difficult and needs more effort to get even the basic ones. Comparing the way the same topics are presented in other references, it is here too complicated.

This short, simple book is a decent introduction to the subject. But, it is largely copied from his earlier book "The Art of Digital Audio." I think the amazon.com claim of 256 pages may be incorrect. I only count 176.

it is a informative book with lots of examples and overall I rate it O.K

Defintitely not a book on fundamental shock waves. Excellent boorkfor specialists and graduate students

This book is poorly edited and too expensive for what you get. However, it is the only book I know of on the topic. It does an Ok job of describing the various techniques for motion estimation, and also delves into theory. What I like about this book is the many numeric experimental results that can be helpful in evaluating and comparing the various techniques. You may find this book useful as a supliment to some of the books on MPEG.