A real-time HDTV signal processor: HD-VSP

A programmable real-time high-definition television (HDTV) signal processor (HD-VSP) has been developed. For conventional TV signals, a previously reported video signal processor (VSP) has introduced flexible software control capability based on subregional processing. In order to expand such flexibility for real-time HDTV signal processing, the HD-VSP employs eight VSP clusters and programmable time-expansion/compression units. An input HDTV signal is converted to eight time-expanded subregional signals to reduce their sampling rate to that of conventional TV signals. The converted signals are then processed by the eight clusters in the same manner as the VSP. Therefore, programs developed for conventional TV signals can be applied to HDTV with little modification. Processed signals obtained from the eight clusters are time-compressed and multiplexed to reconstruct an output HDTV signal. This HD-VSP has 16 component processors per cluster and is capable of 2.5 giga-operations/s. Several coder programs, including a discrete cosine transform coder and an intraframe differential pulse code modulation (PCM) coder, are developed to evaluate HDTV coding efficiency.