This book gives the professional and student one place to look for answers and guidance on MPEG. It incorporates low-level as well as sophisticated reviews of the major technical elements,and includes sufficient tutorial material that even naive users should be able to understand the answers to their MPEG questions. It contains many pictorial examples so that the benefits and limits of MPEG can be estimated from the data in the book. The full functionality of the entire MPEG standard is exclaimed. Guidance is given about the purpose behind some of the choices and implementers. Paricular emphasis is placed on the image compression of the MPEG standard.