Digital television | EPFL Graph Search

Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of television signals using digital encoding, in contrast to the earlier analog television technology which used analog signals. At the time of its development it was considered an innovative advancement and represented the first significant evolution in television technology since color television in the 1950s. Modern digital television is transmitted in high-definition television (HDTV) with greater resolution than analog TV. It typically uses a widescreen aspect ratio (commonly 16:9) in contrast to the narrower format (4:3) of analog TV. It makes more economical use of scarce radio spectrum space; it can transmit up to seven channels in the same bandwidth as a single analog channel, and provides many new features that analog television cannot. A transition from analog to digital broadcasting began around 2000. Different digital television broadcasting standards have been adopted in different parts of the world; below are the more widel

Spatio-temporal segmentation and object tracking

Visual information is taking a predominant place in our society. With the advent of digital technologies, visual information will find new applications in domains ranging from communication, commerce to entertainment. New functionalities will be required that permit an extended interaction with the visual information. In particular, this is the case for digital television and the related problem of video sequence compression. The extent of possible interactions depends on the manner in which the visual information is represented. Up to now, the canonical representation is used. Also referred to as the waveform representation, it is a technical artifact of the image capture procedure. This representation severely restricts the functionalities available to the end-user. The latter is unable to freely manipulate or customize the received visual information. In this dissertation, we propose to describe the visual information through a semantically meaningful representation. This representation directly derives from the scene content, which is decomposed in terms of its constituting objects. Consequently, the viewing process is totally disconnected from the image capture procedure. This permits full interactivity with the visual information, leading to enhanced functionalities for the end-user. The essence of this dissertation is to automatically define the objects forming the scene arid to automatically track them through the video sequence. Two main issues are identified: the initial segmentation of the objects and their tracking. The first issue deals with segmenting the scene into its constituent objects. This has to be performed on the basis of the information available in two consecutive frames. In order to solve the problem, a split-and-merge approach is used. First, the image is segmented into small, spatio-temporally homogeneous regions. This is achieved through a top-down approach where spatial, temporal and change information is combined. These regions are used as a starting point to define the objects forming the scene. A bottom-up approach is used which iteratively merges the regions. The propensity of the regions to form an object is assessed in terms of both spatial and temporal information. The second issue deals with segmenting and tracking the objects in the successive frames. The coherence between the successive segmentations is ensured by using past and current information. Also, the different objects composing the scene are identified throughout the video sequence. This identification relies on temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal features of the objects. The proposed representation of the visual information finds a natural application in video coding. A second generation video coding scheme is presented which combines compression efficiency with extended functionalities. In particular, scalable coding is achieved in terms of both scene content and object coding quality.

EPFL1997

Efficient error correction solutions for OFDM based digital video

Mauro Lattuada

The robustness of the delivery of digital compressed video streams has always been one of the main topic of the standardization bodies to assure the Quality of the Service (QoS). The MPEG standard which is nowadays the reference for digital television defines how to format the various component parts of a multimedia program and how they are combined into a single transmission bit stream. Although the MPEG stream may be directly used over a wide variety of media, it may also be used over a communication network and it is already packetized into short data packets. The multiplexed stream can be transmitted over a variety of communication networks such as Radio Frequency links (UHF/VHF), Digital Satellite links, Cable TV Networks, Standard Terrestrial Communication Links (PDH, SDH) or Packet/Cell Links (ATM, IP, IPv6, Ethernet). In critical and error prone channels the robustness of the stream has to be granted by employing strong error correction schemes. Depending on the used media the transmission has its own coding scheme and modulation methods designed for the particular environment. For example, in the case of IP based links the transfer protocol accepts loss of data and the problem can be easily overcome by retransmission. Wireless simplex transmission cannot exploit the same approach. Wireless transmission always means variable channel conditions especially when one or both terminals are moving on the outfield. The channel fading evolution and the signal impairments increase the error rate and corrupt the data. In the recent past the standardization of the DVB-T shows the possibility to provide a robust service for digital video delivery. This standard provides superior picture quality with the opportunity to view pictures in standard format or wide screen (4/3 or 16/9) formats, services including subtitling, multiple audio tracks, interactive content, multimedia content where, for instance, programs may be linked to world wide web material. Beside the provided services and features the standard offers also a modulation and transmission scheme capable to cope with the impairments of the terrestrial channel and to provide a BER after forward-error correction below 10-12. Unfortunately, these performances are guaranteed only for fixed reception, since the standard was originally aimed to replace classical analog television broadcasting in the UHF band. This thesis addresses the study of enhanced error-correction schemes in the scope of a compact, flexible and robust high-throughput real time video transmission system able to cope with high mobility channels. The study of a transmission system and error correction scheme tailored for this kind of application is here presented. The system exploits the OFDM modulation technique. This modulation scheme has already proven to be very effective in hostile environments. A flexible modulation scheme is employed to obtain variable bandwidth transmission and enhanced performances especially for mobile applications. The main topic of this research is the study of an effective error correction scheme adapted to this application. While nowadays the digital television standards use a concatenated error correction scheme based on convolutional inner coder, in this work the proposed solution is based on a turbo inner coder. Turbo codes has already shown good performances compared to convolutional codes. These results are here applied to a concatenated scheme to obtain very low BER. A comparison of the performances of various turbo coding techniques under certain implementation constraints is done in this work.The second element of the error correction scheme is the channel interleaver used to average the channel fading in time and frequency. This mechanism is conceived to be adapted to the modulated bandwidth and is optimized for high throughput real time video. This study shows that the proposed system proves to be very effective in high mobile channels because of the deep averaging strategies in conjunction with the high efficiency turbo based concatenated error correction scheme.

EPFL2005

Increasing reuse in learning objects authoring: a case study with the Cacuria tool

Roberto Gerson De Albuquerque Azevedo

Artifacts and best practices reuse as a way of improving educational resources and easing and speeding up the authoring process have been an important theme since the earliest research efforts on Learning Objects (LOs). In such a context, authoring tools that allow teachers and tutors to create educational content without the need for advanced programming knowledge play an essential role. This paper presents the evolution of Cacuria -an authoring tool that supports the creation of interactive multimedia educational content for the Web and digital TV- towards improved support for LOs reuse and analyzes the impact of the proposals as perceived by the users of the tool. The proposed evolution is based on previous work on reuse requirements and best practices on authoring LOs, which resulted in the inclusion of three new features on the tool: Layouts, Widgets, and Application Templates. Through these new resources, authors can build LOs by reusing resources created by other authors and reuse good practices, e.g., through previously validated pedagogical practices. The added functionalities were evaluated in a qualitative study with 11 teachers/tutors. The results of the study indicate that the participants believe that the new functionalities improved the creation of reusable LOs both in the creative aspect and in the reduction of the total development time.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Efficient error correction solutions for OFDM based digital video

Mauro Lattuada

EPFL2005

Spatio-temporal segmentation and object tracking

EPFL1997