Homework 1

JTD TK. III 2018

1. Describe the difference between progressive and interlaced scan. What is the advantage
and disadvantage of interlaced scan compared with progressive scan, when the line rate
per second (lines/s) is the same?

2. What are some of the factors that determine the minimal required frame rate (frames/s)
and line number (lines/frame) for the eye not to see separate frames or lines?

3. Consider a raster video converted from a 3D video signal with 10 frames/second, 100 x
100 pixels/frame. What is the maximum possible temporal frequency (Hz or cycles/s)?

4. What is the bandwidth of the NTSC video?

5. How is audio multiplexed with video into a single signal? What is the carrier frequency
used for audio?

6. Which modulation technique is used for modulating a TV signal to a carrier frequency?

What is the total bandwidth allocated for a TV channel? Illustrate with a figure the
spectrum of a modulated TV channel.

7. Describe the difference between DSB-SC, SSB-SC, and VSB-SC. Illustrate with
spectrum plots in the frequency domain.

8. Draw block diagrams for modulation and demodulation using VSB-SC. And explain
briefly the function of each block in the diagrams.

9. With amplitude modulation (e.g. DSB), one can either suppress the carrier or transmit
the carrier (leading to DSB-SC and DSB-C, respectively). Discuss the difference in
demodulation for DSB-SC and DSB-C. What are the major advantage and
disadvantages of each?

10. Suppose a color is represented by a RGB triplet of (100, 100, 100). What are the YIQ
values? Explain your result.

11. Suppose a color is represented by a YIQ triplet of (70,-32,-32). What are the RGB
values?

12. What are the benefit of converting RGB values to YIQ (or any luminance + chromi-
nance representation) when transmitting a color signal?
13. Describe the QAM method used to multiplex the I and Q components together onto a
color sub-carrier frequency. Draw the modulation and demodulation block diagram.

14. What are the factors that one must consider when choosing the color sub-carrier
frequency? What is the sub-carrier frequency used in NTSC color standard?

15. Draw a block diagram for demultiplexing YIQ components from the composite video
signal (containing the baseband luminance signal and the QAM modulated I and Q).
Explain each component.

16. Why are comb filters desired in separating luminance from chrominance than
conventional low-pass/bandpass filter?

17. Draw the overall spectrum of a color TV signal (including Y, I, Q and audio) when
modulated over a carrier frequency.

18. How can a monochrome TV set automatically extract the luminance signal from a
broadcasted color TV signal?

19. Draw the block diagram of the NTSC color TV transmitter and receiver, and explain
functions of each component.

20. Describe why backward compatibility is important in technology development.

21. What are the factors considered when choosing the sampling rate for digitizing a raster
video?

22. Why is that we can and want to sample chrominance components at a lower sampling
rate than luminance? What are the differences between the color formats 4:4:4, 4:2:2,
4:1:1, 4:2:0?

23. The figure below show two interlaced video frames.

a. Generate the field data associated with each frame.
b. Deinterlace field 1 of frame 2 using field averaging. Write down the deinterlaced
field.
c. Now try line averaging. Write down the deinterlaced field.
d. Now try field and line averaging. Write down the deinterlaced field.
e. For this simple example, which method is better?
f. In general, what are the pros and cons of different methods?
 100 100 200 100 100 100

100 200 200 100 100 200

100 100 200 100 100 100

100 200 200 100 100 200

100 100 200 100 100 100

Frame 1 Frame 2

24. What is the main difference between image coding and video coding? Why is it not
efficient to simply apply an image coder (say JPEG) to individual video frames? (This
is what motion-JPEG does).

25. What is motion-compensated temporal prediction? How is it used in video coding?

26. What are the major steps in block-based hybrid video coding? Draw the block diagram
of a typical block-based hybrid video encoder and corresponding decoder, and explain
the functions of each component.

27. What are the major steps in DCT-based coding for each block? What are the
differences in coefficient quantization and run-length coding for I-blocks and P/B-
blocks?

28. What are the different modes in a block-based hybrid video coder? How do they each
operate on a macroblock?

29. Which mode is most efficient for a block that is part of a moving object that has
appeared in the previous frame? Which mode is most efficient for a block that
corresponds to part of an object that first appeared in this frame, and continues in the
next frame? Why don’t we use P or B modes all the time? Why is I-mode needed?

30. Why are compressed video streams sensitive to transmission errors? What are some
simple ways to make the bit streams more resilient to transmission errors? What are we
trading-off when increasing the error resilience?

31. What does scalability mean in video coding? Why is scalability desirable in practical
applications?

32. What is the target application of the H.320 standard? What is the video coding standard
used in H.320?
33. What is the target application of the H.323 standard? What is the video coding standard
used in H.323?

34. What is the target application of the H.324 standard? What is the video coding standard
used in H.324?

35. What are the main differences between H.320, H.323 and H.324 applications in terms
of available bandwidth and delay variation?
36. H.261 and H.263 video coding standards differ mainly in how motion estimation is
performed. Describe some of the techniques adopted in H.263 that helped improve its
coding efficiency over H.261.

37. What is the target application of MPEG-1? What are the different parts of MPEG-1
standard?

38. Describe some of the differences between MPEG-1 and H.261/H.263 video coding
standards?

39. What is the target application of MPEG-2? What are the different parts of MPEG-2
standard?

40. Describe some of the differences between MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video coding
standard?

41. What are the different ways that MPEG-2 uses to generate two layer video? Explain
each briefly.

42. MPEG-4 video coding standard uses the so-called “object-based coding”. Describe
what it is and how a receiving user may make use of it? What are the three types of
information contained in each object?

43. Describe some techniques incorporated in H.264 that helped improving its coding
efficiency over H.263/MPEG-4.

44. Describe the two possible alternatives (compatible vs. simulcast) for migrating from
analog TV system to an advanced television system. What are the pros and cons of
each? What make the non-compatible all-digital approach win over other options?

45. Describe the major components in the US DTV system. What are the audio and video
formats supported? What are the audio and video coding standards used? What channel
coding and modulation techniques are used?
46. Repeat 45 for the Europe DVB system.

47. How does the GOP structure support channel switching in addition to random access
(after recording). What decides the maximum delay after a person switch to a different
channel? What is the maximum delay considered acceptable? For fast forward, what
determines the slowest forward speed? For rewind, what determines the slowest rewind
speed?
48. Describe the major components in a perceptual audio coding system. Draw the block
diagram and explain the function of each block.

49. What is the purpose of channel coding? How is this achieved in principle?

50. What is the purpose of data interleaving? What are some of the disadvantage of
interleaving?

51. What is concatenated channel coding? And what is its benefit compared to a single
channel code?

52. Describe the channel coding scheme used in the ATSC DTV system and the DVB
system respectively.

53. Describe how to map digital signal to analog waveform using 4-ASK. Illustrate the
waveform corresponding to each 2-bit symbol. For the following sequence of bits,
01001011, sketch the resulting analog signal. (you can assume an arbitrary carrier
frequency for this exercise. For example, each symbol contains only one or two cycles
of a sinusoid).

54. Describe how to map digital signal to analog waveform using 4-QAM. Illustrate the
waveform corresponding to each 2-bit symbol. For the following sequence of bits,
01001011, sketch the resulting analog signal.

55. Describe the principle of 8-VSB modulation scheme used for US DTV.

56. Describe the principle of the OFDM modulation scheme used for the DVB system.

57. What are the pros and cons of 8-VSB vs. COFDM?