We present the architecture for a four chip integrated receiver decoder compliant with the European Digital Terrestrial Video Transmission standard (DVB-T); both 8 K and 2 K FFT size are supported. The paper focuses on the algorithms used for I/Q signal generation, OFDM demultiplexing, channel estimation, synchronization and channel decoding. The algorithms chosen are robust against the channel and interference conditions to be expected, including Rayleigh fading, co-channel interference from other (e.g. existing analogue) services and tuner imperfections. The channel SNR degradation arising in the digital part of the receiver-with imperfect channel estimation, synchronization and quantization-with respect to the BER at the output of the Viterbi decoder is not more than 2 dB from theory.

A fast algorithm for gaining scene background information from a TV sequence is presented. This picture information is used by an uncovered background predictor in a motion-compensating predictive coder for videoconference or picture telephone applications. In uncovered background regions, prediction error entropy is reduced close to the value of the frame difference entropy in static regions, which is regarded as a practical lower bound. Almost all these picture elements can therefore be reconstructed without transmission. A motion-compensating hybrid differential pulse-code modulation (hybrid-DPCM)/transform coder is supplemented by uncovered background prediction. The maximum bit rate reduction achieved in the experiments is 9% for a picture where 14% of the picture elements of temporally changed regions belong to uncovered background regions.>