State of the art in digital audio/video communications

This series of 5 lectures will introduce the principles, describe the technology and discuss the latest advances in digital audio and video communications. The first lecture presents the principles of the digitisation process of sounds, still and moving images, and discusses its advantages and drawbacks. Encoding formats are also presented. Lecture 2 and 3 are dedicated to compression principles and techniques : why to compress, how, what are the differences between still and moving images ? Source, entropy, transform, vector quantization compression are explained. Advanced techniques such as psyshoacoustic modelling, wavelet encoding, or object-based compression are also described. Lecture 4 concentrates on the requirements placed by digital audio and video applications on the underlying communications networks (latencies, delay variation, isochronism, multicasting). Lecture 5 describes what can and cannot be done today over existing networks such as the Internet, discusses the evolution of the digital media and communications technologies, and proposes a few visions of the future.