Scalable Open-Architecture Television

This article will 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 bandwidth, number of lines/frame and frames/sec, we propose 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 scalable, flexible, and 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 become obsolete) when higher-resolution cameras and displays become available. We will explain that a particular hierarchical representation for video (that of 3-D subband coding) possesses these desirable properties and offers a common technological basis for digital television channels spanning several orders of magnitude in bandwidth. We will 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.