Hybrid compression of video with graphics in DTV communication systems

Advanced broadcast manipulation of TV sequences and enhanced user interfaces for TV systems have resulted in an increased amount of pre- and post-editing of video sequences, where graphical information is inserted. However, in the current broadcasting chain, there are no provisions for enabling an efficient transmission/storage of these mixed video and graphics signals and, at this emerging stage of DTV systems, introducing new standards is not desired. Nevertheless, in the professional video communication chain between content provider and broadcaster and locally, in the DTV receiver, proprietary video-graphics compression schemes can be used to enable more efficient transmission/storage of mixed video and graphics signals. For example, in the DTV receiver case, this will lead to a significant memory-cost reduction. To preserve a high overall image quality, the video and graphics data require independent coding systems, matched with their specific visual and statistical properties. In this paper, we introduce various efficient algorithms that support both the lossless (contour, runlength and arithmetic coding) and the lossy (block predictive coding) compression of graphics data. If the graphics data are apriori mixed with video and the graphics position is unknown at compression time, an accurate detection mechanism is applied to distinguish the two signals, such that independent coding algorithms can be employed for each data-type. In the DTV memory-reduction scenario, an overall bit-rate control completes the system, ensuring a fixed compression factor of 2-3 per frame without sacrificing the quality of the graphics.