Image coding and the coding standards

For our purposes, it is the development of the processing algorithms which is of interest, together with the international determination to produce a set of standards, without which image coding activity in general would have the same status as that of facsimile transmission before a similar move some years ago totally changed the situation and made that latter means of communication, for many people, no more than a run-of-the-mill household operation. So, on the one hand we have research workers around the world (often in competition with each other) coding still images and video sequences at lower and lower rates, and on the other (once the discipline had matured sufficiently) an increasing pressure to use the results gained in the laboratories as a practical way of overcoming the basic problem of the huge bandwidth or capacity needed to transmit or store an image of reasonable resolution in its uncoded form. The intention of this paper is to examine both of these activities, and their relationship, in a non-mathematical way for the benefit of those not conversant with the field