Stephan Hartwig

Broadcasting and Processing of Program Guides for Digital TV

From the consumers point of view, the transition from analog to digital TV comes in two flavors: quantity and quality. First, the number of services increases significantly, and, second, there are new service types to come. Paper TV guides with their linear and nonhierarchical presentation of program information are unlikely to be used any longer in service and program event selection; instead, electronic program guides (EPGs) will provide an interactive user interface offering comfortable and fast program browsing functions. Unlike in the computer world, the desired schedule information will virtually be served from a local random access database, and it will mostly be fetched from the current transmission. Caching techniques will be applied; however, they are restricted due to the lack of sufficient local storage media. This makes the development of transmission, processing, and buffering strategies a difficult task, bearing in mind that users expect fast and random access, whereas the service provider wants to keep the transmission bandwidth allocated for this type of data as small as possible. Starting with an outline of the digital video broadcasting (DVB) standard for service information (SI) and an example EPG, this paper will analyze SI transmission schemes and SI caching and processing strategies. Typical hardware and software constraints of consumer set-top boxes (STBs) are taken into account.

Mobile multimedia-challenges and opportunities

Today, we observe the creation of an increasing number of multimedia consumer devices for mobile and home use. This includes set-top-boxes, game consoles, personal digital assistants (PDA), e-books, but also mobile phones. Although these devices have many things in common with desktop PCs-above all Internet access-it is widely accepted that they will serve a different purpose. Many committees and companies are currently trying to define the open application platform for tomorrows consumer terminals for home use, among others the so-called Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) of the European Digital Video Broadcasting (DVE) project. Meanwhile, on the cellular end of the multimedia business, portable appliances like cellular phones, e-books and PDAs are evolving to multimedia terminals, starting from narrow band Internet services like the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and slowly adopting video technologies. One of the main obstacles to overcome is bandwidth limitation-even for 3G mobile systems-and broadcast technology is considered to be a serious candidate to fill this gap, both for TV and data services. A special challenge is to provide multimedia services in vehicles, where, due to the static environment relative to the driver, some requirements for mobile and static terminals apply at the same time. This paper summarizes some trends and opportunities of mobile multimedia-especially in the DVB and GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) domain, while outlining the different requirements for mobile, home and car use of multimedia services.

Wireless microservers

With Bluetooth components getting smaller and cheaper, we might soon integrate wireless microservers into all kinds of electronic devices. The authors explore application of a general-purpose, pluggable microserver, based on wireless application protocol and Bluetooth technology, for remote control purposes.

WAP over Bluetooth: technology and applications

Today, the vast majority of microprocessors goes into embedded systems which silently sneak into every corner of our everyday life. Until now, many of these processors only support standalone applications (e.g. household appliances), while the technology is there to make these appliances communicate to each other or humans wirelessly. At same time, WAP and HTML offer a general-purpose, interoperable presentation platform for user interfaces. Thus, many people believe that man-machine and machine-machine communication will be the next major paradigm shift for the information society. This article outlines the technology and applications focussing on wireless access protocol (WAP) and Bluetooth technologies.

On the performance bounds of motion-compensated deinterlacing

Abstract The terms ‘proscan up-conversion’ or ‘deinterlacing’ stand for algorithms for the conversion of interlaced image sequences into progressive format by interpolating the lines which are missing due to interlaced scanning. Although deinterlacing is already known to improve TV image quality, such techniques will become even more important in future. Firstly, standard interlaced image sequences will be increasingly processed and displayed on computer platforms and thus usually require progressive scanning and an increased temporal resolution. Secondly, the emerging market of light valve projection equipment demands high-quality proscan up-conversion since the image quality of these display techniques relies heavily on the light efficiency of non-interlaced scanning. By describing deinterlacing as a problem of linear prediction theory, this paper derives upper MSE performance bounds for these algorithms. Thus, a theoretical framework is provided which allows to analyse the effects of various parameters like motion vector inaccuracy, temporal integration and memory constraints on the efficiency of motion-compensated deinterlacing. It is, for example, shown that these algorithms can be very sensitive to motion vector inaccuracies especially if the image sequence is recorded with very short exposure time. Finally, it is briefly demonstrated that the presented analysis can easily be extended to the case of field- and frame-rate up-conversion of interlaced (‘100 Hz’) and non-interlaced image sequences.

The multimedia home goes mobile

It is widely accepted today that the multimedia terminal in the home will serve a different purpose than a desktop PC. Many committees and companies are currently trying to define the open application platform for tomorrows consumer terminals for home use, among others is the so-called multimedia home platform (MHP) of the European DVB project. Meanwhile, consumers and the car industry are getting interested in mobile access to multimedia services. This paper summarizes the trends and opportunities of mobile multimedia, especially in the DVB domain.