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The objective of digital broadcasting has evolved from providing a plain video service to offering a realistic visual experience. Technologies such as 3DTV and UHDTV have been suggested to achieve this new objective by providing an immersive and stereoscopic visual experience. However, owing to the high bandwidth requirements of such services, the broadcasting industry has faced a challenge to find a new transport mechanism for overcoming the bandwidth limitation. The standardization organizations, the Advanced Television Systems Committee, Digital Video Broadcasting, and Telecommunications Technology Association, have been working on the integration of broadcasting and a broadband network (IP) to resolve the bandwidth issue of realistic video services. This paper introduces a frame-level timeline synchronization and transport system target decoder model for providing a stable 3DTV service over a hybrid network. The experimental results indicate that the proposed technologies can be successfully adopted as a reference model in a broadcast-broadband hybrid 3DTV service and other IP-associated hybrid broadcasting services.

As a new hybrid broadcasting service, augmented broadcasting shows enhanced broadcasting content on a large TV screen, while augmented reality (AR) on a mobile device augments additional graphical content onto an input image from the device's own camera to provide useful and convenient information for users. A one-sided broadcasting service using AR has already been attempted in virtual advertisements during sport broadcasts. However, because its augmentation is preprocessed before the video image is transmitted, the viewer at home may have no influence on this formation; and no interaction for the user is possible unless the viewer has a direct connection to the content provider. Augmented broadcasting technology enables viewers to watch mixed broadcasting content only when they want such service and to watch original broadcasting content when they do not. To realize an augmented broadcasting service, the most important issue is to resolve the hybrid content synchronization over heterogeneous broadcast and broadband networks. This paper proposes a novel hybrid content synchronization scheme for an augmented broadcasting service and presents its implementation and results in a terrestrial DTV environment.

This paper introduces a novel repetitive delivery scheme for the left and right views in service-compatible (SC) 3D video that provides full backward compatibility to a legacy DTV system while retaining HD 3D visual quality without additional bandwidth or a codec over the legacy broadcasting channel. The proposed SC delivery scheme transmits individual view sequences of a 3D video in interlaced form, that is, a left-view sequence of a 3DTV program to be used repeatedly is transmitted first and stored locally, and the right-view sequence of the 3D program is then transmitted. This paper specifically describes the signaling, synchronization, and storage format methods used to validate the proposed SC delivery scheme. The experiment results show that the proposed SC delivery scheme can be effectively applied for an SC 3DTV service without degrading the DTV quality using only legacy DTV platforms.

This letter introduces a stereoscopic video broadcasting system that provides 3D visual service and has full backward compatibility with legacy digital television (DTV) service in the same channel capacity. The proposed stereoscopic video broadcasting system in this letter is composed of both a hybrid codec and a multiplexer with a newly defined stereoscopicrelated signaling method. In conclusion, the proposed method can be effectively applied for 3D broadcasting services without major changes in legacy broadcasting platforms.

This paper presents a multimedia streaming platform for efficiently transmitting MPEG-4 content over IP networks. The platform includes an MPEG-4 compliant streaming server and client, supporting object-based representation of multimedia scenes, interactivity, and advanced encoding profiles defined by the ISO standard. For scalability purposes, we employ an application-layer multicast scheme for media transmission using overlay networks. The overlay network, governed by the central entity of the network distribution manager, is dynamically deployed according to a set of pre-defined criteria. The overlay network supports both broadcast delivery and video-ondemand content. The multimedia streaming platform is standards-compliant and utilizes widespread multimedia protocols such as MPEG-4, real-time transport protocol, real-time transport control protocol, and real-time streaming protocol. The design of the overlay network was architected with the goal of transparency to both the streaming server and the client. As a result, many commercial implementations that use industry-standard protocols can be plugged into the architecture relatively painlessly and can enjoy the benefits of the platform.

In the decoding process associated with interframe wavelet coding, the inverse wavelet transform requires high computational complexity. However, as video technology starts to pervade all aspects of our lives, decoders are becoming required in various devices such as PDAs, notebooks, PCs, and set-top boxes. Therefore, a decoder's complexity needs to be adapted to the processor's computational power, and consequently a lowcomplexity codec is also required for scalable video coding. In this paper, we propose a method of controlling and lowering the complexity of the spatial wavelet transform while sustaining the same coding efficiency as that currently afforded. In addition, the proposed method may alleviate the ringing effect for slowly changing image sequences.

Fast binary dilation and erosion algorithms using run-length encoding (RLE) are proposed. RLE is an alternative way of representing a binary image using a run, which is a sequence of '1' pixels. First, we derive the run-based representation of dilation and erosion and then present the full steps of the proposed algorithms in detail.

Recently, MPEG has opened activity to standardize scene representation for lightweight applications such as in mobile phones. The standard is named lightweight applications scene representation (LASeR) and can be applied to improve and make efficient rich media applications and services on mobile devices. In this standard, we proposed an efficient type codec for point data to maximize the bit efficiency of LASeR. In this paper, we describe the new method and the test results of the proposed scheme.

One of the recent and most significant technical properties can be expressed as “digital convergence,” which is helping lead the technical paradigm into a ubiquitous environment. As an initial trial of realizing a ubiquitous environment, the convergence between broadcasting and telecommunication fields is now on the way, where it is required to develop a scalable video coding scheme for one-source and multi-use media. Traditional scalable video coding schemes have, however, limitations for higher stable picture quality especially on the region of interest. Therefore, this paper introduces an adaptive scanning method especially designed for a higher regional-stable picture quality under a ubiquitous video coding environment, which can improve the subjective quality of the decoded video by most-preferentially encoding, transmitting, and decoding the top-priority image information of the region of interest. Thus, the video can be more clearly visible to users. From various simulation results, the proposed scanning method in this paper can achieve an improved subjective picture quality far better than the widely used raster scan order in conventional video coding schemes, especially on the region of interest, and without a significant loss of quality in the left-over region.