The increase demand to incorporate video data into telecommunications services, the corporate environment, the entertainment industry, and even at home has made digital video technology a necessity. A problem, however, is that still image and digital video data rates are very large, typically in the range of 150Mbits/sec. Data rates of this magnitude would consume a lot of the bandwidth, storage and computing resources in the typical personal computer. For this reason, video compression standards have been developed to eliminate picture redundancy allowing video information to be transmitted and stored in a compact and efficient manner.