Digital Television Broadcasting: Nondisruptive Improvement over Time

Metadata

Publisher: SMPTE — White Plains, NY, USA
Doc Type: Journal Article
Content Type: Original Research
Abbreviated Title: SMPTE J
Volume: 106, No. 7, pp. 439–444
Abstract: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided, at an early date, that it was important for the digital broadcasting system to be upgradeable over time. Therefore, it established, as an important desideratum for the system to be chosen, that it could be improved in a nondisruptive manner, i.e., without making the original equipment obsolete. An effective way to do this is to formulate a single baseline system that produces standard-definition imagery, and to carry out any later upgrading exclusively by adding one or more enhancement signals. Enhanced receivers would extract all data streams to create improved imagery. This approach to upgrading permits the manufacture of digital receivers (and set-top converters for NTSC receivers) of the lowest possible cost since high-definition decoding and signal-processing capability is unnecessary. If the enhancement signals are transmitted by means of a nonuniform constellation, then they will appear to be random noise to baseline receivers, guaranteeing that such receivers will continue to be usable regardless of the exact nature of the enhancement signal(s). While it would be preferable for the baseline system to be progressively scanned, it would be possible to permit both interlaced (I) and progressive (P) baseline formats to be used and yet to design enhanced receivers in such a way that they would operate properly with both. The source coding required in such a system is already well known by such names as pyramid coding, layered coding, or multiresolution coding. Channel-coding methods are also described that permit receivers to extract data from the transmitted signal in accordance with the local SNR and their signal-processing capabilities.
Publication Date: 1997-07-01
DOI: 10.5594/J15744
ISSN: Print: 0036-1682
Link: https://doi.org/10.5594/J15744
Author(s): William F. SchreiberMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge. Mass.
bio
William F. Schreiber received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering at Columbia and his Ph.D. in applied physics at Harvard University. He worked at Sylvania from 1947 to 1949 and at Technicolor Corp. from 1953 to 1959. From 1959 to 1990, he was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently professor emeritus of electrical engineering. He was director of the Advanced Television Research Program from 1983 until his retirement in 1990. Since 1948, Dr. Schreiber's major professional interest has been image processing. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received the Honors Award of TAGA, the David Sarnoff Gold Medal from SMPTE, the Gold Medal of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), and is a four-time recipient of the SMPTE Journal Award.
Michael O. PolleyMichael O. Polley. DSP R&D Center, Texas Instruments. Dallas, Tex.
bio
Michael O. Polley received his B. S., M. S., and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, 1990, and 1996, respectively. His master's thesis work involved building a real-time, joint-transform optical correlator using Texas Instruments' deformable mirror device (DMD) technology. His doctoral research at MIT involved designing the channel modulation and coding system for an advanced terrestrial television broadcasting system. In 1996, Polley joined the DSP R&D Center at Texas Instruments, where he has been investigating remote access systems using digital subscriber line modems. His primary research interests include DSP for communications applications, very high-speed modems, and mixed-signal design.
Susie J. WeeHewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif.
bio
Susie J. Wee received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, 1991. and 1996, respectively. She performed her master's thesis work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she participated in an earth-to-space optical communication experiment, which was the precursor to a successful deep-space optical communication demonstration with the Galileo spacecraft. At MIT, her doctoral research was in the area of scalable video coding and video communication over broadcast channels. As part of her thesis, she participated in the design of an advanced television system for terrestrial broadcasting. In 1996 she joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, where she is currently investigating issues in compressed-domain processing of video applications in transcoding and Internet delivery. Her main research interests are in the areas of video communication and video processing.
Copyright: © 1997 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Inc.

Bibliographic Reference(s)

1. In April 1997, the FCC decided that the turn-off date would be 2006, making the following considerations even more important. EXTERNAL
10. Polley M. O. . “Hybrid Channel Coding for Multiresolution HDTV Terrestrial Broadcasting.” Proc. IEEE lntl. Conf. on Image Processing. , 1 : 243 – 247 . Nov. 1994 . EXTERNAL
11. We offer no opinion on the 59.94/60.00 question. It would be better to choose only one. and we would choose 60. If broadcasters absolutely insist on 59.94. which we think is a mistake, then it might be better to abandon 60. Likewise, although we believe that equal horizontal and vertical resolution (“square pixels”) is very desirable, there is sentiment on the part of some progressive-scan advocates for reducing the horizontal resolution somewhat in order to reduce the overall data rate. This would be a much smaller departure from the ideal than to allow interlace. It should be allowed. EXTERNAL
12. At one point, at MIT, we had a side-by-side demonstration of I versus P. using two 1000-line monitors, each displaying an image of the back of a dollar bill, captured in full resolution. Not a single one of the hundreds of television professionals who saw this demonstration had previously had any idea of the degree of interline flicker that is produced with video that does not have the reduced vertical resolution that is present in typical NTSC signals. EXTERNAL
13. Federal Communications Commission. Fourth Report and Order, MM Docket 87–268. issued Dec. 27, 1996 , Washington DC. EXTERNAL
2. Hitachi has under development a simplified decoder that produces SD imagery from an HDTV MPEG data stream, at some cost to image quality. Not enough work has been done to determine whether this approach will be acceptable. EXTERNAL
3. Kretzmer E. R. , “Reduced Alphabet Representation of Television Signals,” IRE Convention Record , 4 : 140 – 153 , 1956 . EXTERNAL
4. Burt P. J. Adelson E. H. , “The Laplacian Pyramid as a Compact Image Code,” IEEE Trans, on Comm. , 31 : 532 – 540 , Apr. 1983 . EXTERNAL
5. Schreiber W. F. . “Image Coding,” U.S. Patent No. 4,268,861, May 19, 1981 . EXTERNAL
6. LeGall D. L. , “The MPEG Video Compression Algorithm,” Signal Processing: Image Communications , 4 : 129 – 140 , 1992 . EXTERNAL
7. Isnardi M. . “Encoding for Compatibility and Recovcrability in the ACTV System,” IEEE Trans, on Broadcasting , BC-33 : 116 – 123 , Dec. 1987 . EXTERNAL
8. Wee S. . “A Scalable Source Coder for a Hybrid HDTV Terrestrial Broadcasting System.” Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. on Image Processing. , 1 : 238 – 242 , Nov. 1994 . EXTERNAL
9. Shannon C. E. Weaver W. The Mathematical Theory of Communication , Univ. of Illinois Press . Urbana . 1949 . EXTERNAL

Source Data (JSON)

Full registry record with provenance metadata. Open directly: /api/doc/10.5594-J15744.json

Reference Tree

Explore all references and references to this document, as a navigable tree.

Open Reference Tree

Reference this Doc

Plain text (ISO 690 compliant)

Preview:

William F. Schreiber, Michael O. Polley, and Susie J. Wee; Digital Television Broadcasting: Nondisruptive Improvement over Time, SMPTE Journal ( Volume: 106, Issue: 7, July 1997); SMPTE, 1997. Available at https://doi.org/10.5594/J15744

Snippet:

William F. Schreiber, Michael O. Polley, and Susie J. Wee; Digital Television Broadcasting: Nondisruptive Improvement over Time, SMPTE Journal ( Volume: 106, Issue: 7, July 1997); SMPTE, 1997. Available at https://doi.org/10.5594/J15744

HTML (ISO 690 compliant)

Preview:

Snippet:

<span class="citation">William F. Schreiber, Michael O. Polley, and Susie J. Wee; <cite>Digital Television Broadcasting: Nondisruptive Improvement over Time</cite>, SMPTE Journal ( Volume: 106, Issue: 7, July 1997); SMPTE, 1997. Available at <a href="https://doi.org/10.5594/J15744" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.5594/J15744</a></span>

SMPTE's HTML Pub

Preview:

Snippet:

<li>
William F. Schreiber, Michael O. Polley, and Susie J. Wee; <cite id="bib-10-5594-j15744">Digital Television Broadcasting: Nondisruptive Improvement over Time</cite>, SMPTE Journal ( Volume: 106, Issue: 7, July 1997); SMPTE, 1997
<span class="doi">10.5594/J15744</span>
</li>