14.1 Introduction

Current digital broadcasting network throughput rates are insufficient to handle

raw video data in real time, even if low spatial and temporal resolution (i.e. frame

size and frame rate) has been selected. Towards alleviating the network bandwidth

requirements for efficient transmission of audiovisual content, coding/compression

techniques have been applied on raw video data, performing compression on both

temporal and spatial redundancy of the content.

More specifically, coding applications that are specialized and adapted in broadcasting

digitally encoded audiovisual content have known an explosive growth in

terms of development, deployment, and provision. Video coding is defined as the

process of compressing and decompressing a digital video sequence, which results

in lower data volumes, besides enabling the transmission of video signals over

bandwidth-limited means, where uncompressed video signals would not be possible

to be transmitted.

In this multievolutionary environment, the new era of digital video broadcasting

has arrived and the beyond typical analog-based transmission for broadcasting

services is a fact, setting new research challenges for the assessment of Perceived

Quality of Service (PQoS) under the latest video encoding and broadcasting

standards.

The majority of the compression standards have been proposed by the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standardization

(ISO) bodies, by introducing the following standards H.261, H.263,

H.263+, H.263++, H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 Advanced

Video Coding (AVC). Some of the aforementioned standards were