According to wikipedia “multimedia is the use of several different media (e.g. text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity) to convey information.” In a more narrow sense, multimedia is a set of software and hardware means used to create, store, and transmit information presented in various digital formats. Although multimedia data is a general term referring to any type of information, we will focus on multimedia data such as speech, images, audio, and video that are originally analog waveforms.

Due to the dramatic progress in microelectronic technologies during the last decades, TV, photography, sound and video recording, communication systems etc., which came into the world and during at least half of the previous century were developed as analog systems, have been almost completely replaced by digital systems. At the same time numerous digital areas and systems such as video conferencing via the Internet, IP-telephony, multi-user games etc. using digitized speech, images, audio, and video appeared as well. Relatively recently multimedia computer technologies started to penetrate into education, medicine, scientific research, entertainment, advertising, and marketing, as well as into many other universally important areas.

Everything mentioned above motivates a deep study of multimedia compression and intensive research in this area. In order to use analog multimedia signals in digital systems it is necessary to solve two main problems. The first problem, related to using these kinds of signal in digital systems, is how to convert them into digital forms.