Robustness Considerations in ISO MPEG-4 and ITU-T Mobile Video Standards

The need for mobile communications is ever increasing due to the sense of timeliness and flexibilities it offers. The increasing diversity of mobile applications is now demanding communications not only in the form of speech and data but also with synthetic and natural images, and video and is referred to as mobile multimedia. However, multimedia is expensive in the sense of its bandwidth requirement, with video being highly bandwidth intensive. Efficient compression of video is therefore critical to making any multimedia application feasible. The feasibility of mobile multimedia of acceptable quality certainly poses a significant challenge. This is so because wireless channels impose a fairly harsh environment for multimedia communications, and while the goal of compression is to squeeze redundancy out of signals to fit them on limited available bandwidth, the requirements for robust delivery necessitate some amount of redundancy. As in the case for wired or wireless environments, the success of multimedia terminals, products or services depends on many factors, of particular significance is interworking which is facilitated by standardization.