• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.640-658
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• 2012

One of the existing terrestrial multi-channel DTV service frameworks, called KoreaView, provides four programs, composed of MPEG-2 based one HD video and H.264/AVC based three SD videos within one single 6MHz frequency bandwidth. However the additional 3 SD videos can not provide enough quality due to its reduced spatial resolution and low target bitrates. In this paper, we propose a framework, which is called a terrestrial multi-channel high quality hybrid DTV service, to overcome such a weakness of KoreaView services. In the proposed framework, the three additional SD videos are encoded based on an H.264/SVC Spatial Base layer, which is compliant with H.264/AVC, and are delivered via broadcasting networks. On the other hand, and the corresponding three additional HD videos are encoded based on an H.264/SVC Spatial Enhancement layer, which are transmitted over broadband networks such as Internet, thus allowing the three additional videos for users with better quality of experience. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, various experimental results are provided for real video contents being used for DTV services. First, the experimental results show that, when the SD sequences are encoded by the H.264/SVC Spatial Base layer at a target bitrate of 1.5Mbps, the resulting PSNR values are ranged from 34.5dB to 42.9dB, which is a sufficient level of service quality. Also it is noted that 690kbps-8,200kbps are needed for the HD test sequences when they are encoded in the H.264/SVC Spatial Enhancement layer at similar PSNR values for the same HD sequences encoded by MPEG-2 at a target bitrate of 12 Mbps.