Do you watch SD videos on a full-HD TV set? - Video scaling technology increasingly important
Do you watch SD videos on a full-HD TV set?
Video scaling technology increasingly important
Image quality of digital television is rapidly improving in Japan. Major electronics manufacturers have been offering liquid crystal television sets, which boast full-HD support, into the market one after another. According to the BCN ranking in September, 2007, the percentage of full-HD in the whole thin-screen television market segment is 25.6%; within 32" types, it is 4.7%; within 37" types, it is 68.5%; and with 40" types, it is 83.4%. TV sets with large-sized screens are quickly advancing toward full-HD.
On the other hand, more contents watched on TV are advancing toward HD as well. In-Stat, Inc., a research company in the U.S., estimates the market size of the HDTV contents distribution in the Asia-Pacific region to reach 3.2 billion US dollars and to reach about 8.1 billion US dollars in 2012. Considering that the market size of the whole video contents in Japan in 2006 is 710 billion yen (per Digital Content Association of Japan), distributed contents are also expected to advance rapidly towards HD. We are in the era to enjoy full-HD videos at home.
Desired Solution against Diversification of Videos
However, as for the videos that individuals stored up so far using camcorders, the situation is a little different story. That is because the videos are mostly of standard definition (or SD). HD video cameras such as AVCHD-compatibles are sold from each manufacturer, but many personal users still use SD-quality camcorders. That is, a part of such users see SD-quality videos on TV sets that are capable of full HD. The larger the TV set's screen size is, the rougher the video quality is as it appears.
Therefore, up-scaling or up-conversion technology is attracting attentions."Up-scaling"(up-conversion) implies that it extends an image with SD image quality that corresponds to the size of conventional analog/digital TV broadcasting to the HD image quality. SD-quality videos in general consist of 640*480 pixels. Up-scaling extends this to 1280*720 pixels with HD-quality or 1920*1080 pixels with full-HD video quality by up-converting it. Needless to say, existing TV sets by themselves have up-conversion functionality as a feature. However, the processing performance is limited.
Recently, it is Toshiba's Super Resolution technology announced at CEATEC Japan 2007 that attracted public attention in this field(Figure 1). It employs "SpursEngine" that inherits the design architecture of Cell Broadband Engine, a high-performance processor on a PC. It transforms SD video images into HD, using Toshiba's own algorithm developed by themselves. In the demonstration performed at the CEATEC venue, Toshiba was showed an SD video (720*480 pixels) compressed with MPEG-4AVC/H.264 that is decoded and converted up crisp, full-HD video image (1920*1080 pixels) on the PC screen.
Furthermore, NXP Semiconductor, Inc. in Netherlands released PNX5100, a video post-processor for liquid crystal television sets, that has an up-conversion capability in September, 2007. The PNX5100 processor has what is called "Motion Accurate Picture Processing" and supports full-HD up-conversion (1920*1080p (@120Hz)). NXP says they plan to manufacture PNX5100 in the first quarter of 2008.
The video industry is in the transition period towards HD, and electronics manufacturers have to deal with a variety of videos with different pixels or configurations without sacrificing the picture quality. Moreover, video codec algorithms employed on the Internet are diversified as well, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1 (WMV 9) Flash and/or DivX. In the future, solutions against diversification of videos are called for to the electronics manufacturers (Nobuyuki Miyazaki=Techno Associates, Inc.)