Rate Distortion Bounds for Voice and Video

Numerous voice, still image, audio, and video compression standards have been developed over the last 25 years, and significant advances in the state of the art have been achieved. However, in the more than 50 years since Shannon’s seminal 1959 paper, no rate distortion bounds for voice and video have been forthcoming. In this volume, we present the first rate distortion bounds for voice and video that actually lower bound the operational rate distortion performance of the best-performing voice and video codecs. The bounds indicate that improvements in rate distortion performance of approximately 50% over the best-performing voice and video codecs are possible. Research directions to improve the new bounds are discussed.