The requirements for multimedia (especially video and audio)
communications increase rapidly in the last two decades in broad areas
such as television, entertainment, interactive services,
telecommunications, conference, medicine, security, business, traffic,
defense and banking. Video and audio coding standards play most
important roles in multimedia communications. In order to meet these
requirements, series of video and audio coding standards have been
developed such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-21 for audio and video by
ISO/IEC, H.26x for video and G.72x for audio by ITU-T, Video Coder 1
(VC-1) for video by the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers (SMPTE) and RealVideo (RV) 9 for video by Real Networks.
AVS China is the abbreviation for Audio Video Coding Standard of China.
This new standard includes four main technical areas, which are systems,
video, audio and digital copyright management (DRM), and some supporting
documents such as consistency verification. The second part of the
standard known as AVS1-P2 (Video - Jizhun) was approved as the national
standard of China in 2006, and several final drafts of the standard have
been completed, including AVS1-P1 (System - Broadcast), AVS1-P2 (Video -
Zengqiang), AVS1-P3 (Audio - Double track), AVS1-P3 (Audio - 5.1),
AVS1-P7 (Mobile Video), AVS-S-P2 (Video) and AVS-S-P3 (Audio). AVS China
provides a technical solution for many applications such as digital
broadcasting (SDTV and HDTV), high-density storage media, Internet
streaming media, and will be used in the domestic IPTV, satellite and
possibly the cable TV market. Comparing with other coding standards such
as H.264 AVC, the advantages of AVS video standard include similar
performance, lower complexity, lower implementation cost and licensing
fees. This standard has attracted great deal of attention from
industries related to television, multimedia communications and even
chip manufacturing from around the world. Also many well known companies
have joined the AVS Group to be Full Members or Observing Members. The
163 members of AVS Group include Texas Instruments (TI) Co., Agilent
Technologies Co. Ltd., Envivio Inc., NDS, Philips Research East Asia,
Aisino Corporation, LG, Alcatel Shanghai Bell Co. Ltd., Nokia (China)
Investment (NCIC) Co. Ltd., Sony (China) Ltd., and Toshiba (China) Co.
Ltd. as well as some high level universities in China. Thus there is a
pressing need from the instructors, students, and engineers for a book
dealing with the topic of AVS China and its performance comparisons with
similar standards such as H.264, VC-1 and RV-9.
