Video conferencing, video telephony, tele-teaching, tele-medicine, surveillance, and monitoring systems are some of the video coding/compression applications that have attracted considerable interest in recent years. The burgeoning Internet has increased the need for transmitting (non-real-time) and/or streaming (real-time) video over a wide variety of different transmission channels connecting devices of varying storage and processing capacity. Stored movies or animations can now be downloaded and many reality-type interactive applications are also available via web-cams. In order to cater...