• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.413-421
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• 2005

As the population of HDTV is growing, among many useful features of modern set top boxes (STBs) or digital video recorders (DVRs), video browsing, visual bookmark, and picture-in-picture capabilities are very frequently required. These features typically employ reduced-size versions of video frames, or thumbnail images. Most thumbnail generation approaches generate DC images directly from a compressed video stream. A discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient for which the frequency is zero in both dimensions in a compressed block is called a DC coefficient and is simply used to construct a DC image. If a block has been encoded with field DCT, a few AC coefficients are needed to generate the DC image in addition to a DC coefficient. However, the bit length of a codeword coded with variable length coding (VLC) cannot be determined until the previous VLC codeword has been decoded, thus it is required that all codewords should be fully decoded regardless of their necessary for DC image generation. In this paper, we propose a method especially for fast DC image generation from an I-frame using multiple-symbol lookup table (mLUT). The experimental results show that the method using the mLUT improves the performance greatly by reducing LUT count by 50$\%$.