| We have seen the revolution in computer and communication technologies in the twentieth century. The telecommunications industry has gone through sea-changes from analog to digital networking that enabled today’s very powerful Internet technology. Transition from the analog to the digital world offered many opportunities in every walk of life. Telecommunications, the Internet, digital entertainment, and computing in general are becoming part of our daily lives. Today we are talking about digital networks, digital representation of images, movies, video, TV, voice, digital library-all because digital representation of the signal is more robust than the analog counterpart for processing, manipulation, storage, recovery, and transmission over long distances, even across the globe through communication networks. In recent years, there have been significant advancements in processing of still image, video, graphics, speech, and audio signals through digital computers in order to accomplish different application challenges. As a result, multimedia information comprising image, video, audio, speech, text, and other data types has the potential to become just another data type. Telecommunication is no longer a platform for peer-to-peer voice communication between two people. Demand for communication of multimedia data through the telecommunications network and accessing the multimedia data through Internet is growing explosively. In order to handle this pervasive multimedia data usage, it is essential that the data representation and encoding of multimedia data be standard across different platforms and applications. Still image and video data comprise a significant portion of the multimedia data and they occupy the lion’s share of the communication bandwidth for multimedia communication. As a result, development of efficient image compression techniques continues to be an important challenge to us, both in academia and in industry. |