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 Gbit/sec transmission bandwidth. We suggest a parallel processing structure using the proposed international standard for visual telephony (CCITT P×64 kbs standard) as processing elements, to compress the HDTV pictures. The basic idea is to partition an HDTV picture, in the spatial domain or in the frequency domain, into smaller sub-pictures and then compress each sub-picture using a CCITT P×64 kbs coder. This seems to be 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 issues are studied: sub-channel control strategy (bits allocated to each sub-picture); and quantization and buffer control strategy for individual sub-picture coders. Algorithms to resolve these problems and their computer simulations are presented.