Digital coding of high-definition television (HDTV) signals

HDTV will typically have a bandwidth about five times that of conventional TV. The increased resolution will provide a significant improvement over conventional television in effectiveness for many military applications. The increased signal bandwidth requirement presents a considerable challenge for transmission, storage, and processing of the HDTV signal. A digital coding technique for HDTV, which was designed through a series of computer simulation experiments, is presented. By removing less perceptible spatial and temporal information, this technique is capable of compressing the real-time HDTV signal in the range of 34 to 45 Mb/s without significantly degrading the perceived quality of the signal. Depending on the transmission channel available, the HDTV signal can be coded at the rate required by adjusting the thresholds and the speed of error recovery to obtain the best quality. The encoded signal can be transmitted via satellite to transportable earth stations or via terrestrial microwave links in encrypted form after digital encoding. Applicability of this technique to many of the proposed terrestrial broadcast advanced television (ATV) signals is discussed