Digital Television and Video Compression

Abstract

Digital TV systems for broadcasting application cause impact on communication and computer industries. For multi-channel services with present TV broadcast standards, commercial cable TV and satellite broadcasting services will use the technology that has become available during the development stage of the Advanced TV (ATV) system, which was originally for HDTV. The success of MPEG-2 compression has opened the door to other options such as multiple channels of SDTV as well as interactive multi-media applications and data broadcasting. Common hardware architectures for digital TV receivers are attracting increasing attention. The ultimate goal is the universal digital TV receiver capable to receive any type of broadcast from anywhere in the world.

Indexing terms:

• Digital video
• Compression
• Multimedia
• Digital broadcasting
• Convergence
• Interactive television
• Internet

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P C Jain

P C Jain born on 1 July, 1946, acquired BE and ME (Electronics) from BITS, Pilani in 1968 and 1972 respectively and MS and DSc (Applied Sciences) from University of Louvain, Belgium in 1977 and 1979 respectively. He worked in CEERI, Pilani for 30 years on speech and video compression and guided various BE and ME students for their thesis work. In 1989 he was invited to Philips, Germany to design VSLI chip for 2-Dimensional Discrete cosine transform (DCT) processor to be used in video compression. He has been to USA two times, once for presenting a paper in IEEE conference on consumer electronics and later on to University of California to work on MPEG-4 and H.263 for very low bit rate video coding. Since 1994 he was responsible for Integrated receiver decoder (IRD) and NICAM receiver projects in CEERI. Since 1998 he is working as General Manager (R&D) in HFCL. He has developed digital satellite set-top box for DTH application which is ready for pilot production.

His research interest is digital TV, Interactive cable TV and HDTV. He has 70 papers in his account in National and International journals. He is a Life Fellow of IETE and Broadcast Engineering Society. He has bagged 3rd IETE- Prof S N Mitra memorial award in 1997. He has been nominated as Man of the year 1998 by American Biographical Institute, USA for his overall contribution to the Society.

V Mitra

Vishwajit Mitra was born in 1947. He received his BSc degree from Lucknow University, in 1965, BEE degree from Roorkee University, in 1969 and MTech degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1971.

He joined Indian Telecommunication Service in 1972 and worked in various capacities in the research wing of the Department of Telecommunications (TRC) and in the Telecom Commission Head Quarters. He held the posts of Director (L), Chief Engineer (TRC) and Deputy Director General (RN). He designed many of the sub-systems and guided the development of first indegenous 34 MBPS Digital Radio system in India. As a network planner, he planned the microwave network of DoT and was instrumental in starting a 2 GHz Rural Radio network in India. As a Senior ITU expert, he planned the rural telecom network of Yemen Republic.

Mr Mitra has actively represented India in many ITU Study Group meetings and committees. He is one of the authors of the ‘Handbook on Digital Radio Relay System’, published by ITU. He has also been associated as technical expert for technology selection/evaluation teams of the Department of Telecommunications.

After taking voluntary retirement in 1995, Mr Mitra worked as an independent telecom consultant. In 1998, Mr Mitra joined Himachal Futuristic Communication Limited as President (R&D) and is presently guiding a dynamic R&D group in HFCL.