Viewdata systems in commercial use at present offer the facility
for transmitting alphanumeric text and graphic displays via the public
switched telephone network. An enhancement to the system would be to
transmit true video images instead of graphics. Such a system, under
development in Britain at present uses Differential Pulse Code Modulation
(DPCM) and a transmission rate of 1200 bits/sec. Error protection
is achieved by the use of error protection codes, which increases
the channel requirement.
In this thesis, error detection and correction of DPCM coded
video signals without the use of channel error protection is studied.
The scheme operates entirely at the receiver by examining the local
statistics of the received data to determine the presence of errors.
Error correction is then undertaken by interpolation from adjacent
correct or previousiy corrected data.
DPCM coding of pictures has the inherent disadvantage of a slow
build-up of the displayed picture at the receiver and difficulties with
image size manipulation. In order to fit the pictorial information
into a viewdata page, its size has to be reduced. Unitary transforms,
typically the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), the discrete cosine
transform (DCT) and the Hadamard transform (HT) enable lowpass filtering and decimation to be carried out in a single operation in the transform
domain. Size reductions of different orders are considered and the merits
of the DFT, DCT and HT are investigated.
With limited channel capacity, it is desirable to remove the
redundancy present in the source picture in order to reduce the bit
rate. Orthogonal transformation decorrelates the spatial sample
distribution and packs most of the image energy in the low order
coefficients. This property is exploited in bit-reduction schemes
which are adaptive to the local statistics of the different source
pictures used. In some cases, bit rates of less than 1.0 bit/pel
are achieved with satisfactory received picture quality.
Unlike DPCM systems, transform coding has the advantage of being
able to display rapidly a picture of low resolution by initial inverse
transformation of the low order coefficients only. Picture resolution
is then progressively built up as more coefficients are received and
decoded. Different sequences of picture update are investigated to
find that which achieves the best subjective quality with the fewest
possible coefficients transmitted.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering