Chengyuan Peng

Digital television application manager

The future digital television will provide viewers new interactive services, e.g., Electronic Programming Guide, TV shopping, video-on-demand, etc. The set-top box needs a middleware to launch these applications before interaction and collect garbage after quitting or switching to another service. It is the application manager’s responsibility to manage the lifecycles of the services. Thus, the application manager plays a crucial role in controlling the applications and efficiently utilizing the limited resources of set-top box. This paper presents a design of an application manager, including a lifecycle model of an application and a communication protocol between an application and the application manager. Also, the Application Information Table (AIT), which carries the essential application signaling information in a transport stream is introduced. Finally, the implementation, which uses Java technology, is described in detail.

A digital television navigator

Digital television is a new, interesting, and rich platform for developing next generation multimedia services. One of the key digital television standards is Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) which includes hardware devices and software architecture. Navigator is the most important multimedia service of digital television. It acts the main index of all the services available in set-top box. In this paper we presented a Java Navigator developed in Future TV project.

A Digital Television Navigator

Digital television is a new, interesting, and rich platform for developing next generation multimedia services. Navigator is the most important service of digital television. It acts as the main index of all services available in set-top box. In this paper, we describe the definition of a Navigator, its functionality, its information retrieval processes, and its information source based on DVB-SI (Service Information) which is multiplexed in MPEG2 Transport Streams (TS). The process of developing a Navigator in Java language is presented. A software model including navigation model, state model of a remote control, and data structures is introduced. Furthermore, a software reference model for DVB-SI demultiplexing is described. Its implementation was based on a client/server approach using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The development issues, performance evaluation, and future research topics are given as conclusions.

Text Adaptation for Mobile Digital Teletext

Small and varying screen sizes of mobile devices pose a big problem for digital Teletext service to display its content. It is difficult to display all the text information on a small screen, where page scroll or transparent page to live video is not practical. This paper presents an adaptive text extraction method which can automatically extract key information from original text and keep semantic meanings as close as possible. We combine both statistical methods and coarse coding algorithm from neural science to shorten long text sentences in terms of generalization. The experiment results show that the methods are efficient and effective.