Drawing on their experience in industry, research, and academia, this powerful author team combines their expertise to provide an accessible guide to data compression standards and techniques and their applications. The essential ideas and motivation behind the various compression methods are presented, and insight is provided into the evolution of the standards. Standards-compliant design alternatives are discussed, and some noncompliant designs also are treated. Covering the fundamental underpinnings of the most widely used compression methods, this book is intended for engineers and computer scientists designing, manufacturing, and implementing compression systems, as well as system integrators, technical managers, and researchers. It provides, in a single source, an overview of the current standards for speech, audio, video, image, fax, and file compression. Authored by five experts from industry and academia who are heavily involved in research, development, and standards-setting activities Covers the full spectrum of multimedia compression standards including those for lossless data compression, speech coding, high-quality audio coding, still image compression, facsimile, and video compression Provides enough theory for you to understand the building blocks of the compression systems discussed, with appendices containing necessary algorithmic details and mathematical foundations