Open Architecture Television

We introduce the concept of Open Architecture Television, in which a digital representation of moving images is specifically designed to facilitate interconnection. The fundamental concept behind the Open Architecture approach is that the next generation of television systems should add degrees of freedom in addition to lines of resolution. Rather than defining a single television standard with a fixed number of lines per frame and frames per second, we consider a system in which production, distribution, storage, and viewing of moving images can each freely employ a variety of standards optimized for specific situations. Scanning parameters of the various segments in the system are effectively decoupled one from another through the medium of a digital interconnection standard. — This flexible, extensible video format will accommodate a variety of production frame rates and resolutions, support a broad range of display quality for differing applications, and incrementally upgrade (rather than becoming obsolete) when higher-resolution cameras and displays become available. We demonstrate that a particular hierarchical representation for video (that of three-dimensional subband coding) possesses these desirable properties and additionally offers a common technological basis for digital television channels spanning several orders of magnitude in bandwidth. We outline the technical and psychovisual considerations involved in developing an Open Architecture Television system, and describe our experiments in signal processing and hardware design toward this goal.

Published

1991-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00916

ISBN

978-1-61482-919-5