Chapter 7. Advanced Telecommunications and Signal Processing Group 7-1 Advanced Telecommunications and Signal Processing Group Academic and Research Staff Professor Jae S. Lim Research Affiliate Carlos Kennedy Graduate Students Fatih Kamisli Support Staff Cindy LeBlanc Introduction The present television system was designed nearly 60 years ago. Since then, there have been significant developments in technology, which are highly relevant to the television industries. For example, advances in the very large scale integration (VLSI) technology and signal processing theories make it feasible to incorporate frame-store memory and sophisticated signal processing capabilities in a television receiver at a reasonable cost. To exploit this new technology in developing future television systems, the research areas of the program focused on a number of issues related to digital television design. As a result of this effort, significant advances have already been made and these advances have been included in the U.S. digital television standard. Specifically, the ATSP group represented MIT in MIT's participation in the Grand Alliance, which consisted of MIT, AT&T, Zenith Electronics Corporation, General Instrument Corporation, David Sarnoff Research Center, Philips Laboratories, and Thomson Consumer Electronics. The Grand Alliance digital television system served as the basis for the U.S. Digital Television (DTV) standard, which was formally adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in December 1996. The digital TV system based on this standard has been deployed successfully. In 2006, digital television receiver sales exceeded analog television receivers in both number and dollar volume in the U.S. The analog TV service is scheduled to discontinue in the spring of 2009. The standard imposes substantial constraints on the way the digital television signal is transmitted and received. The standard also leaves considerable room for future improvements through technological advances. Future research will focus on making these improvements. The digital television system is a major improvement over the analog television system. The next major improvement over the digital television system is likely to be in the introduction of 3-D television. We are currently planning future research in this area. The specific research topics where we made some progress are as follows: 1. Reduction of Blocking Artifacts Using Side Information Sponsor: Advanced Telecommunications Research Program, Higher Education Council of Turkey Project Staff: Fatih Kamisli A method that is often used in image and video compression is transform coding based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). In this method, an image (or the motion-compensated residual in the case of a video) is divided into non-overlapping blocks of pixels and the DCT coefficients of each block are quantized. When the compression rate is high, each block is not well represented and discontinuities