MPEG2 video and audio codec board set for a personal computer

This paper describes MPEG2 video and audio coder and decoder boards and a set of dedicated codec chips which are the key components of these boards. MPEG2 is the international standard for moving picture coding algorithms and is expected to be applied to various fields because of its high image quality. The design policy has been decided based on intensive investigations of potential applications and popularity of video communication. From this view point, it is very efficient and important to implement an MPEG2 codec system on a personal computer (PC) platform. Since a short delay is particularly important for real-time applications such as teleconferencing, SP@ML has been adopted. In this case, the number of coding operations is reduced, but our simulation results show that the picture quality is almost the same as that of MP@ML. Non-real-time operation is also made possible so that application to interactive editing of video sequences can be achieved. Moreover, a considerable amount of processing is reduced by a hierarchical search algorithm. A nonlinear pre-filter is used to remove the noise included in the input video signal. Our prototype boards have been designed as PC/AT extension boards. The typical frame size is 720/spl times/480 pixels, and its rate is 30 frame per second. The maximum bit rate of the compressed data is 15 Mbit/sec.