Our Blog
Research >> Interactive TV
DescriptionTelevision systems are migrating to digital technology and more Digital Television (DTV) systems are being deployed around the world everyday. This change is creating a technological revolution in the entertainment industry. Besides delivering superior picture and sound quality, the new DTV technology allows the addition of new add-in services that enhance the TV viewer's experience. Current Technology: Over the years the concept of 'interactivity' for TV has been evolving. For example, Video-On-Demand systems, TV systems with VCR-like functionality and Advanced TV were referred to as Interactive TV even though they do not allow the user to interact with the TV program they are watching. In Video-On-Demand systems, viewers select a movie or TV show from a library, to be only played back on their TV. Present set-top boxes support TV viewers save, pause or rewind a live TV show.
Researchers
Our current project:
Augmented Video in Interactive 3DTV: 3DTV is getting a lot of attention lately. Research on the 3DTV area has been focused on solving problems in 3DTV broadcasting, encoding and display. Although 3DTV could provide a dramatic enhancement in the TV viewing experience and users’ expectations on realistic images are very high, users’ expectations on interactivity are also very high. However, in current research much less attention has been paid to interactivity. Research on interactivity has been focused on changing the point of view in multi-view video and free-viewpoint video. One way to enhance interactivity in video is the use augmented video. In augmented video additional objects are rendered over the video to produce an image enhanced with features not present in the original stream. Such additional objects provide an augmented reality and represent a way of interaction with the user, since the user can interact with the video using the additional objects. In our current research we are looking for problems that can rise when the 3DTV stream is augmented with extra objects. Such problems include appropriately rendering the additional objects to produce in the viewer a correct perception of depth, and the appropriate rendering of the additional objects to produce a realistic image.
Our previous project:
Playing Broadcast Interactive TV in the Blu-ray system: The ultimate goal of our interactive TV project is to enable the video and interactive content transmitted by a DVB-MHP broadcasting system to be played in real-time on the Blu-ray platform. The Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) is the latest interactive TV standard introduced by Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) group, which is the most widely used digital TV broadcasting standard in the world. On the other hand, Blu-ray, a new-generation optical disc format, has been recently introduced. Compared to the traditional DVD technology, Blu-ray is designed to offer advanced interactive features and high definition video quality. Although both DVB-MHP and Blu-ray support Java-based interactivity, there are several differences between the two to make them incompatible. To realize the complete compatibility between the two systems in real-time, we must have a very efficient scheme to transcode the metadata, video, and interactive data from the DVB-MHP format to the Blu-ray system format. By achieving this goal, we not only eliminate the set-top-box, which is a must for the interactive digital television nowadays, but also allow audients to enjoy high-definition programs with profound interactivity.
One of the main challenges in realizing this compatibility is the conversion of the “system information” data. These data carry signaling and descriptive information about the broadcasting programs and services. We proposed methods that transcode this information efficiently (i.e., in real-time). The methods include a de-multiplexing scheme that is 33% faster than the conventional method, and a fast hierarchical search algorithm to extract the needed information from the de-multiplexed stream. The structure of the transcoder was also designed to ensure high efficiency and stability.
Another challenge to achieve compatibility between broadcast interactive TV and the Blu-ray system is to transcode the interactive data. We developed an interactive data transcoding scheme that receives a broadcast interactive TV stream, filters the interactive data and channel metadata and changes the interactive data format to a Blu-ray compliant format. Our transcoder successfully identifies the appropriate Sections containing interactive data and separate them into categories that can be processed in parallel and independently of each other, and assembles the interactive data that are compliant with the Blu-ray standard.
Selected Publications:
- S. Infante and P. Nasiopoulos, “Real-time DVB-MHP to Blu-ray Interactive Data Transcoding”, International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, Vol. 2008, Article 319063, 18 transactions pages, doi:10.1155/2008/319063, 2008.
- S. Infante and P. Nasiopoulos, “A DVB-MHP to Blu-ray Transcoding Scheme for Interactive Data”, IEEE Conference on Consumer Electronics, 3 proc. pages, Las Vegas, January 2008.
- Z. Mai, P. Nasiopoulos, R. K. Ward, "Real-Time DVB-MHP to Blu-Ray System Information Transcoding", IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 639 - 647, May 2008.
- Z. Mai, P. Nasiopoulos and R. Ward, “Real-Time DVB-MHP iTV to Blu-ray System Information Transcoding”, 3rd International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing (ISCCSP) 2008, pp. 1460 – 1463, March 2008.
- Z. Mai, P. Nasiopoulos and R. K. Ward, "Efficient DVB-MHP to Blu-Ray System Information Transcoding", 20th IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, pp. 20 – 23, March 2007.