'This body of work by Thomas Wiegand and Bernd Girod has already proved to have an exceptional degree of influence in the video technology community ... As the community has grown to appreciate the long-term memory feature, it has become an embraced part of the conventional wisdom. When the ITU-T launched an initial design for a next-generation 'H.26L' video coding algorithm beyond the capabilities of today's standards, Wiegand's long-term memory idea was in it from the very beginning. The tide has turned. What once seemed like the strange and wasteful idea of requiring storage and searching of extra old pictures is becoming the accepted practice - indeed it is the previous practice of throwing away the old decoded pictures that has started to seem wasteful.' From the foreword by Gary J. Sullivan (ITU-T/SG16 & MPEG Video Chairman)

• 1. State-of-the-Art Video Transmission.- 1.1 Video Transmission System.- 1.2 Basic Components of a Video Codec.- 1.3 ITU-T Recommendation H.263.- 1.4 Effectiveness of Motion Compensation Techniques in Hybrid Video Coding.- 1.5 Advanced Motion Compensation Techniques.- 1.6 Video Transmission Over Error Prone Channels.- 1.7 Chapter Summary.- 2. Rate-Constrained Coder Control.- 2.1 Optimization Using Lagrangian Techniques.- 2.2 Lagrangian Optimization in Video Coding.- 2.3 Coder Control for ITU-T Recommendation H.263.- 2.4 Choosing the Coder Control Parameters.- 2.5 Comparison to Other Encoding Strategies.- 2.6 Chapter Summary.- 3. Long-Term Memory Motion-Compensated Prediction.- 3.1 Long-Term Memory Motion Compensation.- 3.2 Prediction Performance.- 3.3 Statistical Model for the Prediction Gain.- 3.4 Integration into ITU-T Recommendation H.263.- 3.5 Discussion and Outlook.- 3.6 Chapter Summary.- 4. Affine Multi-Frame Motion-Compensated Prediction.- 4.1 Affine Multi-Frame Motion Compensation.- 4.2 Rate-Constrained Coder Control.- 4.3 Experiments.- 4.4 Assessment of the Rate-Distortion Performance of Multi-Frame Prediction.- 4.5 Discussion and Outlook.- 4.6 Chapter Summary.- 5. Fast Motion Estimation for Multi-Frame Prediction.- 5.1 Lossless Fast Motion Estimation.- 5.2 Lossy Fast Motion Estimation.- 5.3 Experiments.- 5.4 Discussion and Outlook.- 5.5 Chapter Summary.- 6. Error Resilient Video Transmission.- 6.1 Error Resilient Extensions of the Decoder.- 6.2 Error-Resilient Coder Control.- 6.3 Experiments.- 6.4 Discussion and Outlook.- 6.5 Chapter Summary.- 7. Conclusions.- Appendices.- A- Simulation Conditions.- A.l Distortion Measures.- A.2 Test Sequences.- B- Computation of Expected Values.- References.