Digital HDTV Compression Using Parallel Motion-Compensated Transform Coders

High Definition Television (HDTV) promises to offer wide-screen, much better quality pictures as compared to today's television. However, without compression a digital HDTV channel may cost up to one Gbits/s transmission bandwidth. We suggest a parallel processing structure using the proposed international standard for visual telephony (CCITT P x 64 kbs standard) as processing elements, to compress the digital HDTV pictures. The basic Idea is to partition an HDTV picture, In space or in frequency, Into smaller sub-pictures and then compress each sub-picture using a CCITT P x 64 kbs coder. This seems to be, by today's technology, a cost-effective solution to the HDTV hardware. Since each sub-picture Is processed by an independent coder, without coordination these coded sub-pictures may have unequal picture quality. To maintain a uniform quality HDTV picture, the following two Woes are studied: 1) sub-channel control strategy (bits allocated to each sub-picture), and 2) quantization and buffer control strategy for Individual sub-picture coder. Algorithms to resolve the above problems and their computer simulations are presented.