HDTV transmission format conversion and migration path

The development of high-definition television (HDTV) in the United States has recently resulted in the establishment of a national standard for its coding and transmission. This standard dictates, among other specifications, certain limitations on the allowable resolution of transmitted HDTV signals. There are many of these allowable formats, permitting scene-dependent processing and encoding; however, this introduces the need for conversion from the production format to the transmission format at the transmitter, and from the transmission format to the display format at the receiver. The adopted HDTV standard limits the resolution of television transmissions. In the future, having a path for migration to higher-resolution formats will keep television up-to-date with available technology. Requiring this migration path to be backward-compatible will be desirable so as to not render standard HDTV receivers obsolete. Since the original enhanced-resolution signal will often be available at the transmitter, it can be used to assist with the migration-path processing. Furthermore, performing computationally-intensive processing at the transmitter will reduce consumer costs and enable all receivers to benefit from the advanced signal processing. This thesis develops a backward-compatible migration-path structure which is based upon hierarchical block processing and motion-compensated prediction. We demonstrate that having access to the original video provides a critical advantage to determining enhancement information. Furthermore, we show that even with only a small increase in digital data requirement, the resulting picture-quality improvement is notable. Thesis Supervisor: Jae S. Lim Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering