Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

Subband coding at 140 Mbit/s of interlaced HDTV-signals

One of the major research topics of the COST 206 project is the digital coding of interlaced HDTV signals with subband splitting techniques. The management committee of the project decided to consider subband coding because of the possibility of compatible coding: in HDTV coding, a low-pass subband can be taken as the compatible TV picture. Also, the possible application in broadband-ISDN networks made subband coding interesting. Several coding schemes have been proposed. The authors describe the proposed schemes, and compare their results. The following coding schemes have been compared during the tests: 4-channel spatial subband coding with motion compensation of lowpass band; 4-channel spatial subband coding with motion compensation of all band; subband splitting with intrafield DPCM coding of subbands; motion compensated prediction and 16-channel spatial subband coding; hierarchical coding scheme; and spatio-temporal subband splitting with arithmetic coding