TVs Technical Minds Meet in Ghent

Adi Kouadio

GHENT, BELGIUM-The 10th annual IEEE Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting Symposium was held June 17-19 with Wout Joseph, Ghent University professor and conference chair, calling things to order. The annual event brings together some of the best scientific and engineering minds in the world to examine and propose solutions to pressing problems that exist in the rapidly evolving field of television broadcasting and will feature more than 100 plenary presentations on such topics as the ATSC 3.0 television standard, the future of broadcasting in a wireless broadband world, video encoding technologies, layer division multiplexing, cloud transmission for television, MIMO OFDM transmission and more.

BMSB speakers and panelists include Richard Chernock from Triveni Digital, Sony' s Luke Fay, John Cosmas from the U.K.'s Brunel University, Wenjun Zhang, chief engineer of China's NERC-DTV operation, Kenichi Murayama from NHK's science and technology laboratories, Ulrich Reimers from Germany's Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Fox TV's Bob Plummer, and many others. Attendees and presenters at the 2015 BMSB represent some 25 nations around the world. The volume of information being disseminated is such that multiple session tracks are necessary to accommodate all presentations.

UHD VERSUS HDR

One of the first-day BMSB papers examined the viewer's perceived differences in UHD video. Quantifying UHDTV's Immersion Parameters, was presented by one of its authors, Adi Kouadio, senior project manager of the EBU's technology and innovation department. Kouadio described testing performed by his organization to try and determine if viewers could discern differences between 4k UHD transmissions and ordinary high-definition television.

That's the question we needed to answer before broadcasters start to invest in [UHD], Kouadi said. We created a research group and focused on high dynamic range and high frame rates. The tests showed that quality improvement is noticed every time the frame rate is doubled.

Kouadio noted that in the testing done, HDR and higher frame rates trumped higher resolution among participants evaluating image quality at normal viewing distances.

We went to 240 Hz and tests showed that quality improvement is noticed every time the frame rate is doubled, Kouadio said. What we believe at EBU is that broadcasters need to go to better pixels; not more pixels.

He noted that the testing indicated that higher frame rates provided a quality gain of almost five times that associated with UHD video and that the benefits of higher frame rates were still perceptible even after video compression was applied.

The three-day international forum on the latest in television transmission and related technologies is taking place in a centuries-old former Dominican monastery building dating back to the 13th century.

The 2015 BMSB event marks the 10th such gathering of broadcasting professionals. The initial conference took place in 2006 in Las Vegas.

Sponsors of this year's television congress include the IEEE and its Broadcast Technology Society, the Future of Broadcast Television organization, the National Engineering Research Center, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the University of the Basque Country, Ghent University's Wireless & Cable Research group, and iMinds.

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