Multi-Channel Serial Digital Video Transmission, Distribution, and Reception

At Honeywell, a team of engineers and scientists, including these authors, researched and developed technologies for seamlessly tiling arrays of displays to render ultra-high resolution imagery. Fully scalable, their architectural design provided viable paths for delivering tens of millions of pixels to the viewer. The topic of this paper was born from the need to provide and to deliver ultra-high resolution imagery. The method described below describes the development and implementation of a compact, low cost, scalable-by-design, video transmission scheme. The objective was to deliver a MxN array of video streams to a JxK array of seamlessly tiled displays, thereby enabling the display of ultra-high resolution, many millions of pixels video. The image source material is digital, but the COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) board that provides an interface to the source material uses an analog transmission scheme, undesirable for many reasons in the system. The transmitter described in this paper taps into the digital 8-bit video stream on the COTS board and creates a serial digital bit stream. The serial video is then transmitted over a coaxial cable to the receiver. The receiver de-serializes the bit stream and recreates the 8-bit video. By going to an all-digital transmission scheme, multiple analog/digital conversions and its associated pitfalls are avoided. Used in an array, each COTS-Transmitter-Coax-Receiver channel enables a fully scalable image delivery system, especially useful for ultra-high resolution imaging systems for digital cinema, medical and similarly demanding applications.

Published

2000-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00145

ISBN

978-1-61482-933-1