International. Researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, UPV, in collaboration with the company SAPEC, have developed a new technology that would facilitate the dissemination of high definition (HD) television channels in interlaced 1080 format from the new generation video compression standard, HEVC.
According to the information published with the Ibero-American Agency for the Dissemination of Science and Technology, Dicyt, this standard, which will soon replace the successful H.264, offers a high efficiency for use on mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones, which translates among other benefits, into a lower storage space and transmission of multimedia content.
Likewise, this better efficiency could translate into an increase in coverage that would make it possible to improve the dissemination of HD content in environments where there are signal problems or portable reception inside buildings. However, the HEVC standard does not provide those same advantages with high-definition (HD) interlaced formats, such as the 1080i format, currently used mostly in the different digital TV platforms.
The solution proposed by the team formed by the UPV and SAPEC allows these improvements to be extended to interlaced formats. The key lies in the pre-analysis and adaptation of the video prior to its compression in HEVC, which facilitates a substantial reduction in the bandwidth necessary for the transmission of these contents.
According to the tests carried out by the UPV and SAPEC team, the implementation of this solution can reduce the bandwidth currently used to values higher than 60%, for highly complex sequences, such as sports ones. This makes it possible to broadcast HD content in 1080-line interlaced format using even a capacity lower than that currently available on standard definition television channels.
Researchers from the UPV and SAPEC presented this new technique at the latest edition of the international congress SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers).
