Comparison of MPEG-2 and M-JPEG video coding at low bit rates

In this paper a comparative analysis of MPEG-2 and Motion-JPEG (M-JPEG) video coding is given, and the performance of these methods is compared via experiments. At first, the algorithmic differences are discussed, then results of the experiments are shown for various video sources with different image sizes and frame rates; the bit rates ranged from 1 to 8 Mbits/sec. The results also show that MPEG-2 intraframe only (I-only) and intra- and predictive-frame (IP) encoding achieve higher picture quality at the same bit rate, or equivalent picture quality at a lower bit rate, than M-JPEG. This quantitative comparison as well as the subjective picture quality evaluation can trigger the use of MPEG-2 video coding instead of M-JPEG at low bit rates.