A method for hierarchical subband HDTV splitting

An investigation is made on the compatibility of the video formats, standard TV (625/50/2:1/4:3), EDTV (625/50/1:1/16:9), HDTVint (1250/50/2:1/16:9) and HDTVpro (1250/50/1:1/16:9) in three-dimensional subband coding. A hierarchical method is proposed leading to a more reasonable joint solution for the issues of digital transmission evolution and interlace-to-progressive scanning conversion in the frame work of bit rate compression. Conventional HDTVint with the diamond shaped spectrum is proposed to be replaced by a kind of “switching” HDTVint signal which consists of three components and motion detection bits (MDB). The first component and the MDB represent TV. The first plus the second component and the MDB represent EDTV. HDTVpro is split into switching HDTVint and an extra component. The switching threshold and the length of temporal filter banks are discussed. Rearranging the pixels in subbands is recommended. Based on the proposed method, the transmission system can evolve through four steps: TV, EDTV, HDTVint, and HDTVpro. Results of bit rate compression are also presented. TV, EDTV, HDTVint, and HDTVpro are compressed to approximately 40, 80, 128, and 256 Mb/s, respectively. Interlace scanning has drawbacks such as line flicker and line crawling as the eye follows the line structure in the picture. Progressive version switching TV and HDTVint could be reconstructed using one frame memory without the problems of handling temporal-vertical diamond shaped spectra of conventional TV and HDTVint based on one-frame memory algorithm in the receiver