Current Distinguished Lecturers

The use of spectrum and its management have been a hot discussion topic since the beginning of radiocommunications. Frequencies are a scarce resource. For decades, engineers have looked for new ways to make a better use of ways of available bandwidth. This means delivering as much content, to as much users as possible, while ensuring as higher quality of service as possible. At this point, where commercial systems operate close to the limit described by Claude Shannon, the demand for more spectrum is even higher than ever. The broadcast industry is right on the middle of the discussion, as its natural operating bands VHF and UHF have raised extraordinary interest for broadband mobile radio access networks. 
The talk will provide the audience a description of current and expected use of the most popular bands used by terrestrial systems. I will speak about spectrum allocation procedures, including spectrum management models, global and regional regulations and how translate into country legislation.
Each band has its own technical advantages and disadvantages, and propagation conditions, as well as required antennas impose specific restrictions to the use of each band. The advantages of each band will be discussed in view of the current allocations to broadband mobile (5G) and terrestrial broadcasting. In both cases, I will cover traditional and new bands, potential future extensions, network planning and propagation implications, receiver performance, antenna restrictions, noise, etc. The talk will finish with a compilation and analysis of the views on spectrum currently published in Europe.
The talk will be a tutorial session and the audience is expected to be have basic propagation, network architecture (cellular, DTV) and video coding skills (BsC students on their final year, MsC students and PhDs).

This talk will review the standards and technologies evolved during the last decade for broadcasting, with the emphasis put on the standards of the DVB family. A tutorial of the newest standards will also be part of the talk, namely the DVB-T2 and ATSC 3.0 standards. The technical content will be covered in relation to the current international spectrum limitation changes (ITU-R WRC 2015 and other regional activities) will be also addressed. The seminar will also provide also a description of the current activities that are being carried out within the Future of Broadcast Terrestrial Television consortium (FOBTV).

Cloud Transmission System is a flexible multi-layer system that uses spectrum overlay technology to deliver simultaneously multiple program streams with different characteristics and robustness for different services (mobile TV, HDTV and UHDTV) in one RF channel. In this system, the transmitted signal is formed by superimposing a number of independent signals at desired power levels, to form a multi-layered signal. The signals of different layers can have different characteristics, i.e., different coding, bit rate, and robustness. For the top layer, however, such characteristics are chosen to provide a very robust transmission that can be used for mobile broadcasting service to handheld devices. The bit rate is traded for more powerful error correction coding and robustness such that the receiving Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) threshold is a negative value, e.g., in the range of -2 to -3 dB. The negative SNR value indicates that the system can withstand combined noise, co-channel interference and multipath distortion powers that are higher than the desired signal power. Such a low threshold makes the top layer highly robust against co-channel interferences, multipath distortion and Doppler effects. The system is already part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, it is aligned with the COFDM and LDPC techniques used by DVB-T2 and it is one of the key technologies being currently analyzed within the Physical Layer Technical Group of the Future of Broadcast Television (FOBTV). This talk will describe the basics of the system, the building blocks and design basics as well as the performance of LDM under different conditions.

This presentation is all about transport technology, it notably deals with: electrical/optical layers, Packet based multiplexing, MPEG tables and descriptors, system layers for DVB and ATSC, Implementation issues, clocking, handling of metadata, syntax monitoring and translation, conflicts prevention.

A complete review of how ATSC 3.0 physical layer works aimed at the non-scientist clientele; this paper will review the basic concepts used in ATSC 3.0 (OFDM, advanced signaling, LDM, etc.) and apply them to a typical ATSC 3.0 transmission system. An extensive use of analogies makes this scientifically sound paper, accessible to managers and engineers of most levels.

This presentation is aimed at outlining the different technological options available to bring HD contents back to a broadcast center from anywhere on the globe, the topics covered are: DVB-S & SVB-S2, real-time or non-real-time transmission, video coding (MPEG-2, H.264 upcoming MPEG-H), system integration and system issues, IP or direct MPEG TS layer ?, FTP issues, unicast or multicast, back channel, real life SNG operation and logistical constrains.

This paper is about the issues and opportunities that IP over satellite raises: IP layer, is a DVB TS is really required?, Encapsulation, unicast, multicast transmission, TCP windowing issues, protocol acceleration, system integration.

Is it possible to regulate an audio signal to the point of being unlistenable? These days, nothing is impossible. The intention of regulators is to satisfy their human constituents. Meters and loudness targets are well intentioned but when relied upon as the sole arbiter of compliance often lead to content that while consistent may be overly so. Like gravy without the occasional lump, the excitement of variance is gone. The trick is to preserve the good variance and manage the not so good variance. The guidelines for making it all work boil down to one rule we should all post on our walls: don’t upset the viewer! This is where it all begins and ends. No complaints=happy regulator=happy broadcaster. The challenge then is to manage the cost of this satisfaction versus preservation of content. Standards, practices and practical methods to make it work will be reviewed.

Mobile devices are a very popular target for both over the air (OTA) and over the top (OTT) video programming. Devices are generally quite small and include mobile phones, tablets, laptops and related devices. The dynamic range “comfort zone” used for mixing television audio for viewing on stereo or surround in-the-home televisions is far too wide for comfortable listening on typical “earbuds” or worse, the tiny speakers found in mobile devices.Dialogue intelligibility is a serious issue for these less-than-ideal transducers. Physical and electrical limitations impact audio quality and can reduce intelligibility. Further, the environments where mobile television would typically be used have a relatively high background noise loudness floor – if the volume is simply increased for acceptable intelligibility on soft passages, loud passages run the risk of outstripping device capabilities or worse, potentially causing uncomfortably loud audio.The goal is to deliver to the viewer the most satisfying experience appropriate for widely varying individual listening environments. Research has shown that attempts to improve mobile audio by simply employing traditional broadcast audio processing systems actually make things worse.This presentation includes a brief review of the most recent work done by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a discussion of the physical and electrical constraints inherent in typical mobile devices and an overview of the psychoacoustic aspects of listening in less-than-ideal environments. It then analyzes various approaches to managing audio intended for mobile viewing starting with an overview of how codecs that support metadata can provide the highest quality, lowest complexity answer for content producers and consumers. The importance of appropriate program delivery specifications is highlighted. Several real-world examples will also be described and recommendations for broadcasters and device manufacturers will be offered.

In January 2018, the new ATSC 3.0 standard was officially released and it offers broadcasters a major leap forward in features and performance. It is built on an IP backbone which provides many advantages including direct support of streaming services, and offers exceptionally robust modulation for reception while stationary or in high speed motion. Video is delivered via efficient HEVC and supports 4K UHD, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and a wider color gamut. The audio system chosen for use in North America, including Canada and Mexico, is Dolby AC-4 and South Korea has specified MPEG-H.

This presentation provides a background that is common for both Dolby AC-4 and MPEG-H and goes into deeper detail on the specifics of AC-4 which offers immersive and personalized audio, dialog enhancement, intelligent loudness, and of course, more efficient compression. Examples are presented to demonstrate how AC-4 is both compatible with existing operations and offers some built-in improvements that can help broadcasters from the start. Details of new advances in efficiency will be revealed, as well as a demystification of the differences between object based immersive and channel based immersive audio. Applications beyond ATSC 3.0 will be presented, including how OTT services can improve and expand the features offered to consumers without the need to expand the library of versions for each title.

Finally, this presentation will cover distribution and interchange requirements for live and file based programming, including audio over IP formats such as AES 67 and new mezzanine audio and metadata transport methodologies for supporting advanced immersive and personalized operations.

Recent advances in technology have result in a significant growth in wireless communications. As wireless access becomes more commonplace, the need for reliable transmission of video data over wireless channel is becoming an increasingly important application requirement. The lecture will first give a general introduction on the issues of error control for wireless video transmission system. Then, an overview on the concepts and strategies of source and channel rate allocation scheme that can be adopted to make the video transmission over error-prone channel robust will be addressed. Relevant state-of-the-art techniques such as GOP-based unequal error protection, two dimensional Temporal-SNR unequal error protection, and adaptive resynchronization will be discussed.

In digital video broadcasting systems, multiple video programs are compressed in parallel to form the elementary streams. The elementary streams are then multiplexed onto a single constant bit rate channel for transmission. At the receiver, the decoder first extracts the elementary streams, passes the corresponding streams which belongs to one program to the elementary stream decoder and then discards all other streams. The simplest approach to this multi-program encoding is to divide the available bandwidth equally among all programs. This method has the disadvantage that lead to uneven visual distortions between different video programs due to variation of scene complexity. To achieve even video quality for all programs, the channel bandwidth should be dynamically allocated to different programs in proportion to the complexity of each of the video sources. The lecture will first give a general introduction on multi-program encoding. Then, the joint rate control algorithm to manage the operation of all the encoders to maintain a uniform picture quality among all video programs is discussed.

The dramatic increase in man-made radio frequency (RF) fields in the environment during the last few decades has led to public health concerns in many parts of the world.  Specifically, questions have been raised on the safety of exposure to RF energy emitted from radar, television and radio communication systems, microwave ovens, video display terminals, and most recently, mobile telephones and base stations, Wi-Fi, and LTE. Wireless power transmission is a newer subject. The IEEE EMF database now has more than 6000 original, peer-reviewed papers useful for public health risk assessment of RF exposure.   The first topic will be on research to summarize recent epidemiological, human, animal and in vitro studies. Reviews of independent expert panels and health authorities will be discussed.  The difference between possible biological effects and established health effects will be explained. To protect human health and to make measurements of RF emitting devices, exposure and assessment standards have been developed by International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety.  Current regulatory status in the world will be presented. Variations of exposure limits adopted by different countries reflect the political nature of this issue. The final topic on risk communication is extremely important, and will cover the findings with respect to the perceptions and attitudes of people, who are trusted sources of information and why, and the influence of culture and other factors on risk communications and precautionary advice. The role of consistency and the need for harmonization of RF safety standards as important elements for minimizing confusion in public concern will be emphasized.

International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection and IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety (ICES) TC95 develop exposure guidelines and standards. International Electrotechnical Commission and IEEE ICES TC34 develop assessment standards.   IEEE standards are developed with oversight of the IEEE Standards Association to ensure due process openness, balance of interests and transparency at every level.  The ICES develops standards for the safe use of electromagnetic energy in the range of 0 Hz to 300 GHz. Technical Committee (TC) 95 develops standards based on established adverse effects and include safety margins for human exposure to electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields, including induced currents from such fields; TC34 deals with methods for the assessment of human exposure to such fields, and develops compliance standards for products that emit electromagnetic energy. The IEEE C95.1 standards development process is further governed by principles of balance of concerns over safe exposure and attainment of levels of restrictiveness that are based on the best available science and engineering. The subcommittee that developed IEEE C95.1-2005 had an extremely wide range of participation by 125 members from 25 countries with expertise in engineering, biology, medicine, measurements, and safety programs. In terms of stakeholders, the committee consists of members of the government, military, academia, industry, and general public. In this presentation, activities of the two ICES Technical Committees will be discussed

For 45 years, I have been involved in various bioelectromagnetics research projects including acute and long-term radiofrequency (RF) bioeffects studies, dosimetry, exposure systems, MRI safety, cancer studies involving hyperthermia and electrochemical treatment, development of RF exposure and measurement standards, and product compliance. My first study demonstrated that effects on isolated nerve and muscle preparations were due to thermal effects of RF exposure. The recording of cochlear microphonics in animals shows the mechanical nature of the microwave auditory effect. In 1992, we published the results of a large-scale lifetime study in which 100 rats were sham-exposed and 100 rats were exposed for 21 h/day for 25 months to a pulsed RF signal. In dosimetry studies, human models were employed as well as many animal species including mice, rats, rabbits, monkeys, and birds of many sizes. Cancer hyperthermia studies demonstrated that knowledge of temperature distribution was crucial for successful treatment. Research on electrochemical treatment of tumors with direct current involved cellular, animal, and clinical studies. Over the past few decades, there has been rather extensive investigation of the public health impact of RF exposure. In my opinion, future research in bioelectromagnetics should place greater emphasis on medical applications.

The C-OFDM spread the transmitted payload among thousands of independent (i.e. orthogonal) carriers modulated at low speed, resulting that the duration of modulated symbols is significantly longer than the delay of multipath echoes. Hence, by extending the modulated symbols with a cyclic prefix (i.e. guard interval) the transmitter permits to all receivers to ignore the beginning of each modulated symbols, this period of the signal polluted by the delayed replica (i.e. the echo) of the previous one. As the Coded-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (C-OFDM) modulation scheme as a natural capacity to cope with the echoes (i.e. the delayed replicas of the signal provoked by the reflections of the radiated waves on obstacles), the broadcasters improved the efficiency of their broadcast infrastructure by forming a Single-Frequency Network (SFN) in which each emitter is a perfect echo of all the others. Operating an SFN implies a good understanding of the parameters of the waveform and the modeling tool developed by the author makes it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of SFN coverage.

In order to become more agile in operations and leverage the economies of scale and flexibility that IT infrastructure brings, Broadcasters increasingly have been migrating from broadcast-specific architectures to IT-based solutions. This goes hand-in-hand with the trend toward software-defined media processing and network function virtualization. This lecture first will give an overview of the challenges that Broadcasters face, the benefits of transforming to "All IP" and a high-level overview of what exactly is meant by "All IP". It then will dive a bit further into the technologies themselves, starting with a discussion of the Joint Task Force on Network Media (JT-NM) roadmap and followed by an overview of the major standards behind "All IP" including the new SMPTE ST 2110 suite of standards for Professional Media over IP and AMWA Network Media Open Specifications (NMOS). The current state of the industry will be reviewed and what's to be done next.

Arguably the hottest new development in viewing experience since the introduction of color to television, High Dynamic Range (HDR) has taken the industry by storm. The level of realism it creates literally makes the viewer exclaim “wow!”, from large Ultra HD and HD displays to tablets and smart phones. This master class will explore in depth what HDR is and how it greatly increases the immersive viewing experience. The different transfer functions of perceptual quantizer and hybrid log gamma will be explained, as well as the many different HDR schemes that have emerged and how they impact broadcaster workflows. Color volume mapping will be described, as well as the state of HDR standardization and implementation.

3GPP has enhanced the point-to-multipoint (PTM) communication capabilities of 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) in all releases since the adoption of eMBMS (enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) in Release 9. Recent enhancements cover not only television services, but also critical, machine-type and vehicular communications. This lecture will review the evolution of PTM transmissions in 4G up to Release 14 of LTE-Advanced Pro, covering key PTM technologies such as eMBMS, MooD (MBMS operation on demand) and SC-PTM (Single-Cell Point-to-Multipoint). The lecture will conclude with a review of the Enhanced TV (EnTV) 3GPP work item and the improvements introduced in the radio access and the core networks and the system architecture, that have enabled the possibility of deploying dedicated LTE Broadcast networks.

This lecture discusses the opportunity to incorporate multicast/broadcast point-to-multipoint (PTM) communication capabilities in 5G as built-in delivery features from the outset, integrating unicast point-to-point (PTP) and multicast/broadcast PTM modes under one common framework and enabling a dynamic use of PTM transmissions to maximize network and spectrum efficiency.  In combination with advanced caching technologies, this approach will open a door to completely new levels of network management and delivery cost-efficiency. This lecture will introduce the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) IMT-2020 (International Mobile Telecommunication) standardization process, review use cases for PTM transmissions in 5G, and present the main technical challenges to design PTM communication enablers in the 5G radio access and core networks and to provide 5G broadcast services using dynamic network slicing

Digital and Hybrid Radio – 21st Century Options for Radio Broadcasters   Radio broadcasting is one of the most important and influential methods of mass communication ever developed.  Analog radio broadcast technology has roots from the very dawn of the electrical age and evolved to successfully compete with television in the second half of the twentieth century.  In the 1990s, digital radio broadcasting emerged and today struggles to become the successful replacement to analog AM and FM radio.  With the proliferation of mobile broadband services today, radio broadcasters have new ways to reach audiences and also new forms of competition.   In this lecture, Mr. Layer will provide a brief history of the development of digital radio services and their status, and then discuss the various competitive, broadband-based technologies that are becoming more prevalent and which offer an alternative for delivery of audio content to listeners.  This presentation will include an up-to-date analysis of the various options that radio broadcasters have for competing with the plethora of streaming audio options now available to consumers.  Mr. Layer will encourage feedback and discourse with the audience and ample time for questions and answers will be provided.

Overview of the capabilities of ATSC 3.0 Next Gen broadcast standard cover physical layer, transport, security, audio, video, captions, interactivity, emergency messaging, and more.

Introduction to the new story-telling capabilities of ATSC 3.0 Next Gen Television including advanced video, immersive and personalized audio, multi-track captions, interactivity and content security.

Introduction to the new emergency messaging capabilities of ATSC 3.0 Next Gen broadcast standard including device wake-up, geo-targeting, rich media content, first-responder and consumer messages, and more.

DAB/DAB+/DRM and their families of digital radio broadcast technologies and standards will be described. Functioning of compression and transmission of audio content are described using block diagrams.

This presentation will provide an overview of terrestrial digital technologies that are available for television. Four DTT technologies and standards will be summarised having more emphasis on DVB family of technologies. The evolution of DVB and ATSC technologies will be described.

Image and video contain large amount of data. Despite the cost of storage and bandwidth are on downward trends, it is required to compress image and video data for storage and transport. Today we talk about ultra-high definition television which may have spatial resolution of up to 4k and 8k in conjunction with high frame rates of 60, 120 frames per second. These image and video capture leads to very high raw bit rates. The presentation will discuss various compression algorithms, standards and impairments due to the compression. Presentation will discuss a framework to evaluate compression artefacts such as blockiness, ringing, blur and colour bleeding including a new set of test pattern which can stress the codec.

Traditional broadcasting was one way communication scheme and it provided little opportunities for interactivity due to lack of an integrated return channel. With the penetration and popularity gained by the broadband, broadcasting can make use of broadband as a return channel to interact with the broadcast services. There are number of technologies and standards available to offer hybrid or integrated broadband broadcast services. This presentation will highlight and provide an overview of three key technologies available for hybrid television broadcasting. Presentation will also address number of services that could offer using broadband including over-the-top (OTT) services that new and incumbent broadcasters could offer.

The ATSC digital television standard has been in place in the United States since December 1996, and has also been adopted by Canada and Mexico. This presentation provides a summary of the 8-VSB digital transmission system fundamentals, including exciter/modulator and receiver/demodulator subsystem blocks and theoretical performance values (ATSC A/53). Additionally, a summary of the recommended transmitter measurement procedures, test equipment, and performance values will be explained (ATSC A/64), including the recent IEEE recommended procedure for determining FCC rigid emission mask compliance (IEEE Std 1631™-2008). Finally, a summary of the recommended DTV receiver performance values (ATSC A/74) will be discussed along with a summary of DTV field test measurement techniques, recommended field test equipment, and field data analysis, along with real-world examples of field test data.

For the most part, the DTV transition has been successful, especially considering the massive changes made in the broadcast and consumer infrastructures. However, post transition DTV reception issues have arisen around the country since the June 12th analog turnoff, particularly for broadcasters who moved their physical RF DTV channel back to the VHF band from a UHF channel. By far, the largest portion of the reception problems comes from indoor reception rather than outdoor reception. For many of these broadcasters, the reception issues were exacerbated not only by viewer scanning problems, but by a number of other problems. This presentation describes the basis for the FCC’s DTV channel allocation process, including the assumed FCC planning factors. Reception problems can be caused by many things, which have led to a number of DTV field tests around the country. From these field tests, trends were observed and studied. A number of these trends will be covered in this presentation such as low authorized radiated power (by the FCC), severe multipath, DTV co-channel and adjacent channel interference, FM radio interference, other electrical interference within a viewer’s home, incorrect or poorly performing consumer antennas, and a lack of viewer education on the selection, placement, and aiming of the antennas. Solutions to date for these problems will be shared along with some suggestions for future viewer education.

Over the years there have been several attempts to deliver broadcast TV to handheld devices. So far all of these have failed for various reasons. With 5G there is now a new technology in place with the potential to deliver broadcast video to mobiles. The presentation will provide an overview for the latest status of 5G broadcast specifications and will compare transmission performance and relevant commercial aspects with already established delivery schemes like DVB-T2 or ATSC3.0

Over the last 25 years Standards Developing Organisations (SDO) like ATSC or DVB have provided the necessary specification for the transition from analogue to digital TV. Analogue Switch Off has happened in many parts of the world. Now, with HD and UHD being specified as well, what will be the future roadmap for broadcast media technology and how can SDOs provide the technology for next generation broadcast?

ATSC3.0 is a major improvement when compared to its predecessor ATSC1.0. It provides a significant performance improvement and a wide range of new features and functionalities. ATSC3.0 consists of a wide range of different specifications covering all aspects of audio/video transmission from the physical layer, AV coding, transport and finally interactive applications. In parallel to ATSC also DVB has specified a comparable range of new technologies covering similar aspects like ATSC.

In this lecture performance and functionalities of the two solutions are analyzed and compared. Similarities and differences are highlighted and the suitability for various use cases is examined.

UHD does not only stand for resolutions beyond HD but also for the advanced features HDR, HFR, wider color gamut and next generation audio (NGH). For broadcasters and network operators introducing UHD services can be an attractive business opportunity. However, increased resolution requires a significantly higher bandwidth as compared to HD services, which can be a challenge, especially for terrestrial broadcast.

This lecture will analyze the quality of experience gains of the individual UHD features for the end-user as well as the associated effort for broadcasters and network operators with a special focus on UHD-1 resolution.

Have things calmed down? 
Abstract: 
Engineers are familiar with the Law of Unintended Consequences.  This lecture tells the story of several unintended consequences related to audio delivery which are in play today. 
The transition to digital delivery systems liberated audio from an existence of less than 40 dB of dynamic range.  The creative community has been quick to exploit that increased dynamic range.  That is the good news, but it is also the bad news.  Without standards in place for digital operating points, sound mixers and producers have used levels varying over at least 30 dB.  This has created consumer irritation. 
The industry realized these issues needed to be addressed.  In 1996, the ATSC Board called for guidance to the content creators and system operators. That work resulted in ATSC A/85.  While the ATSC was at work, the US Congress took the subject up and wrote the CALM Act.  How that Act intersects with A/85 is a crucial part of this lecture. 
Beyond the US component, this lecture also surveys the similar efforts conducted by the EBU and others around the world. 

IEEE BTS Lecture – Media System Timing “Beyond Black Burst” 
People who have not built or maintained traditional real-time media production systems (video with audio) may not realize that each (and almost every) device in the system is connected via 5 wires (often many more).  These carry video in and out (in the best case with embedded digital audio), sync (a simple analog signal termed “black burst”), time of day timecode, and control.  As systems got larger and more complex this became painful (and expensive) both to wire and maintain.  To use a current CS phrase “it doesn’t scale.” 
In reaction to this media signals have begun to map into IP based networks, as has the control side.  What was left was sync.  This remained true as image formats evolved beyond standard definition images into High Definition and recently Ultra-High Definition image production. 
SMPTE has been working on this problem for over a decade and has now published the first two parts of a multi-part document which leverages work done by the IEEE (IEEE 1588 to be specific) and defining how media systems can be synchronously timed with “just” a clock.  There are some implications to this change which is rapidly being adopted. 
This lecture will review the structure of traditional digital media standards, the aspect of timecode distribution as well as device control.  The lecture will also cover the questions which arise around system design and media signal redundancy.

People who have not built or maintained traditional real-time media production systems (video with audio) may not realize that each (and almost every) device in the system is connected via 5 wires (often many more). These carry video in and out (in the best case with embedded digital audio), sync (a simple analog signal termed “black burst”), time of day timecode, and control. As systems got larger and more complex this became painful (and expensive) both to wire and maintain. To use a current CS phrase “it doesn’t scale.” In reaction to this media signals have begun to map into IP based networks, as has the control side. What was left was sync. This remained true as image formats evolved beyond standard definition images into High Definition and recently Ultra-High Definition image production. SMPTE has been working on this problem for over a decade and has now published the first two parts of a multi-part document which leverages work done by the IEEE (IEEE 1588 to be specific) and defining how media systems can be synchronously timed with “just” a clock. There are some implications to this change which is rapidly being adopted. This lecture will review the structure of traditional digital media standards, the aspect of timecode distribution as well as device control. The lecture will also cover the questions which arise around system design and media signal redundancy.

Many engineers, upon entering the workforce, are astonished to discover that the majority of media delivery systems “still” are based on an “ancient” standard:  MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS).  ISO/IEC 13818-1, also known as ITU-T H.220, was first published in 1995!  The MPEG Committee, however, continues to update this document, most recently in 2018.  Why? (and what’s the secret?) 
This lecture will unravel this mystery and delve into enough technical details that audience members will understand much of the rationale for continued use in the industry. 

This lecture discusses important design parameters for VHF and UHF broadcast antennas used for FM and TV.  An emphasis is given to directional pattern design using computer modeling and taking into account the effects of the mounting structure on the antenna pattern for both intentional directional antennas as well as non-DA antennas. Techniques for pattern design are presented, including array theory and NEC modeling. Coverage analysis with terrain-based propagation software, consideration of elevation pattern design, near-field power density calculations, and input match tuning techniques are also covered.

Nowadays, the digital video broadcasting technologies have been widely used to replace the traditional analog terrestrial TV. The direct satellite TV, digital TV with mobile reception (DVB-H and ATSC M/H), and the internet protocol television (IPTV) are very popular in our daily life. The digital transmission and signal processing techniques and the efficient implementation issues are crucial in these digital TV services. These essential techniques will be discussed and introduced during the lectures.

The transmitter identification (TX-ID) has been proposed in the recent ATSC digital terrestrial broadcasting standards. The watermarking techniques based on the Kasami sequences are used recently. The theoretical studies on the second-order statistics, interference analysis and geographical capacity of these TX-ID techniques will be provided; the implementation concerns together with the new problems associated with TX-ID will be discussed during the lectures.

Graph data have been prevalent for mobile transmission and broadcast. Situation- and location-aware graph data processing becomes crucial in the multimedia applications nowadays. Trends and states-of-arts on the mathematical analysis and algorithms for graph-based data processing will be discussed in this lecture. Potential applications can be found in geolocation technology and graph/image processing.

Non-orthogonal multiplexing (NOM) technology can provide significantly higher transmission capacity than the traditional orthogonal multiplexing (OM) technologies, when delivering multiple services with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. This has been recognized by both the research communities from digital broadcasting industry and the mobile broadband industry. The NOM technology can find many applications in future broadcast and broadband systems. These include the simultaneous delivery of mobile and fixed services, seamless local content insertion in single-frequency-networks (SFN), delivery of mixed unicast-broadcast services in 4G/5G systems, as well as the integrated access/service and backhaul transmissions.

This presentation first describes the fundamental capacity benefit of NOM over OM technology from the information theory point of view. Next, the different applications of NOM technology in future broadcast and broadband systems are introduced, including the benefit that NOM offers and the challenges to realize it in practice. Finally, some guidelines to achieve feasible implementation of NOM in practical systems are discussed.

To deliver robust mobile broadcast services, single-frequency-network (SFN) is preferred due to the inherent spatial diversity. However, each SFN transmitter requires a backhaul link, which results in high infrastructure cost, especially for small cell networks with large number of transmitters. This talk presents the novel concept of using Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) to implement wireless in-band backhaul to multiple SFN transmitters. Frist, the concept of LDM will be introduced and what motivate us to use it for wireless in-band backhaul transmission. Next, the application of this concept in the next generation ATSC 3.0 digital broadcast system is described, which focuses on implementing low-power gapfillers to improve the mobile service coverage performance for highly populated indoor and closed areas (airports, shopping malls, stadiums, etc.). Finally, the application of LDM to deliver integrated broadcast service and backhaul signals in 5G framework is introduced, where the focus is put on realizing a low-cost MBSFN on the low-power-low-tower broadband networks.

Reliable service detection by mobile and handheld receivers has always been a challenge for wireless communications systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), including most digital broadcasting systems (ATSC 3.0, DVB-T/T2/NGH, DAB, etc.) and mobile broadband systems (LTE). For these systems, higher robustness is usually achieved at the cost of significant loss of transmission capacity.
This talk discusses the technologies to improve the mobile receptions in OFDM-based systems, without sacrificing the transmission throughput. We start with transmission technologies which filtered the OFDM signal to offer a much lower sidelobs, and hence reduce the signal power spill-over among subchannels. Next, different receiving technologies that could improve the mobile signal detection are described, including antenna diversity techniques, inter-carrier-interference (ICI) cancellation techniques, as well as the digital beamforming techniques. Finally, this presentation will introduce the mobile service delivery using the newly developed layered-division-multiplexing (LDM) technology, and shows that using LDM can offer extremely robust mobile reception by enabling efficient delivery of mobile services with extremely low signal-to-noise ratio thresholds, which makes the ICI introduced by channel variation much less damaging to the signal detection.

Three-dimensional Television (3D-TV) is a promising candidate for the next generation broadcasting applications. Several 3D video prototypes have been developed based on distinct techniques in 3D visualization, data format representation, and content production. Among them, stereoscopic 3D video has gained a strong momentum in consumer market, establishing itself as the first wave of 3D-TV. Conventional multi-view video is a natural representation for stereoscopic displays, while more sophisticated 2D-plus-depth format with depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) has been attracting increasing attention from both industry and academia, as the DIBR technique helps to further advance the interactivity in 3D video systems and to significantly enhance the 3D visual experience relative to conventional stereoscopic systems. This lecture will present a technical overview of DIBR-oriented 3D-TV system, with specific discussions on the technical challenges, recent advances, standardization efforts, and promising applications of DIBR-oriented 3D video.

3D video (3DV) has raised a huge interest from both academia and industry communities.  It allows users to watch videos from different views to provide an immersive 3D perception.  A naive approach to produce content for 3DV would be to directly create content of multiple views.  However, such an approach is impractical because of the large number of views which would have to be captured in the encoder side and transmitted to the end-user.  What is more, even with a very large number of views, it is still not capable of covering any arbitary viewpoint in a region.  Hence, virtual view rendering is becoming a key technical procedure in the whole processing chain of a 3D video system.  Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) oriented view synthesis is one of the representative view synthesis methods.  However, an inherent problem in the DISBR view synthesis is occurrence of hokes in a synthesized image, which is also known as the disocclusion problem.  This talk examines the hole generation mechanism in the DIBR view synthesis and provides new perspectives on hole filling.  New hole filling methods are developed by using the occluded background information and the multiple reference views.  Experimental results demonstrate the proposed hole filling methods achieve syperior performance in terms visual quality of synthesized views.

Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) plays a crucial role to maximize coding efficiency in video coding. In the current block-based hybrid video coding using motion compensation, the RDO is typically performed on the block level individually and independently, which is far from being optimal as it ignores the strong spatial-temporal dependency among the block/frame coding optimizations. However, a global RDO problem becomes so complex that the processing of each coding unit is dependent and entangled each other due to the extensive use of spatial-temporal predictions in video coding. In this talk, we formulate the dependent RDO problem in the context of motion compensated hybrid video coding and then simplify the problem to temporal-dependent RDO (TD-RDO). To address the TD-RDO problem, we specifically develop a source distortion temporal propagation model, which attempts to estimate the influence of the current coding unit to the future coding units in a temporal propagation chain. Accordingly the corresponding Lagrange multiplier for the TD-RDO is obtained. Experimental results will be presented with a discussion of our future work on the global RDO.