Digital Television Exploitation

Transmitting voluminous video signals over channels orders of magnitude lower in data rate thus requires the latest advances in compression technology as a fundamental enabler. This is especially true for communications over wireless links that oftensupport data rates as low as 16 kbps - one needs more than 50,000:1 compression! In our experience, no proprietary solution is competitive with the latest standards technology, H.26L, in scientific evaluations. It is also desirable to use standards-basedsolutions due to the vital interoperability issues, as well as the availability of low-cost, reliable COTS components. As we demonstrate, no existing video coding standard can adequately meet the needs of this program. We rely, therefore, on the latesttechnology in development. With the emerging H.26L standard - our solution, we offer 3-4:1 better than MPEG-2 - a breakthrough. The challenge is to map the latest research into COTS components, negotiating real cost/performance tradeoffs, to solvepractical problems. A further challenge is to apply the DTV technology to the even more limited environments of missiles, Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs), manpackable systems, and unmanned sensors.Significant benefits accrue in using this newstandards-based technology for a variety of commercial applications, including the recording and playback of high-defintion television programming.