Advanced in recent years in memory management areas include robust algorithms for reducing size of image, video, or audio data and vlsi architectures for relatively low-cost but sophisticated compression processes, thus spurring developments of codecs. [ref: Multimedia Telecommunication News]  A codec is a system that will encode and decode multimedia information; generally as compressor and decompressor.
 
  This implies that we may be able to treat multimedia information as just another data type that can be manipulated, transformed, stored, and transmitted as complete information; not as individual types cobbled together.  This presents the possibility of standardization across different platforms and applications.  Different standards for compression methodologies will be presented from algorithmic and architectural viewpoints for image and video data will be presented.
 
II. Background

   The basic task of a codec is to compact a given signal for efficient representation.  Table 1 presents a list for applications that can benefit for a standardized codec.