Introduction

Television was initially intended for sports, news

and entertainment application and was almost entirely distributed by terrestrial broadcasts. Television is being distributed by other means, such as cable (fiber or coaxial), video tapes or disks (analog or digital) and satellites (e.G. Direct broadcast). Moreover, the television signal packaged for terrestrial broadcasting is very wasteful of the broadcast spectrum and can benefit from modern signal processing.

Introduction to HDTV
Three current colour television standards- NTSC (National Television System Committee), PAL (Phase Alternating Line), and SECAM (Sequential Couleur Avec Memoirs) . Common to the three HDTV standards are widened aspect ratio (16:9 instead of 4:3), increased picture resolution, and audio of compact disc quality. High Definition Services -- invented in Japan . In Europe, HD-MAC transmission via DBS was developed. The signal processing of HD-MAC coding and decoding is digital.

Introduction to HDTV
Transmission format is analog and suffers from
known drawbacks. The four proponents of HDTV are Digi Cipher by GI Corp. and MIT, DSC HDTV (Digital Spectrum Compatible) by Zenith and AT & T, AD-HDTV by ATRC (Advanced Television Research Consortium, consisting of Compression Lab. David Sarnoff Research Center, Thomson Consumer Electronics, North American Philips, and CCDC(Channel Compatible Digi Cipher) by MIT and GI Corp.

HDTV
HDTV-digital processing of TV signal both at the
transmitter and in the receiver. The analog camera signal and sound signal are first converted into digital form at the transmitter. D/A converters are needed at the final stages of the receiver to change video and audio signals from digital to analog form.

HDTV
HDTV - Increased spatial and temporal resolution
Increased image aspect ratio-clear Picture Multi-channel CD-quality surround sound Reduced artifacts Bandwidth compression Channel encoding to make better utilization of terrestrial spectrum Better interoperability with the evolving telecommunications and computing infrastructure.

HDTV
Spatial resolution by approximately a factor of
two in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Picture-1000 scan lines and more than 1000 pixels per scan line . The result of this is that the number of active pixels in an HDTV signal increases by about a factor of five, with a corresponding increase in the analog bandwidth. Most HDTV systems specify the image aspect ratio to be 16:9.

HDTV
Each audio channel is independently compressed,
and these closed captioning, teletext, encryption, addressing, program identification and other data services are in a layered fashion. Audio fidelity is nearly as good as that obtainable from the current generation of CDs.

HDTV In Various Countries

In the 1970s, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation
(NHK) began to design the next generation television system. The main systems work was done by NHK, but the substantial infra-structure equipment required for a complete system (e.g. cameras, recorders and displays) was developed by other Japanese companies. Although the European Broadcasting Union (EBUb), had given some indication of support for the NHK-1125/60 system for professional studio use, in 1986 the broadcasting and manufacturing interests in Europe agreed on their own high definition standards, called HD-MAC.

Problems Of Current Analog TV:

Inter-line flicker, line crawl and vertical aliasing
are largely a result of interlaced scanning. Large are flicker as seen from a close distance or on large screens is due to our ability to resolve temporal brightness variations at frequencies even beyond 60Hz when the peripheral areas of vision are engaged. Computer displays employ much higher frame rates (up to 72 Hz) to overcome large area flicker.

Problems Of Current Analog TV:

Analog television, a number of artifacts arise, due to transmission- ghosts, which are due to multiple receptions of the same signal, cannot be entirely removed from the analog signal. In digital HDTV, ghost cancellation can be done more successfully. Static raster visibility is more apparent on larger displays since viewers can make out individual scan lines. Increased spatial resolution in HDTV will reduce this effect substantially .