Japan's NHK lifts lid on TV of the future

[Gregg Lengling]

By Martyn Williams
IDG News Service, Tokyo Bureau
01-06-2004
 
Japan's public broadcaster Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) opened its research and development (R&D) center to the public over the weekend and gave visitors a look at some of the technologies it is working on that may become part of broadcasting in the future.

Since the annual event was held last year, NHK and Japan's major commercial broadcasters have begun high-definition digital terrestrial television in Tokyo and two other cities. Together with digital HDTV satellite broadcasting, launched in 2000, the switch to digital for Japan's television industry is now well underway and many of the technologies demonstrated by NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) are pushing the idea of anytime, anywhere access to digital broadcasting.

Inside the home, the 'anytime' concept is anchored around a technology that NHK calls Integrated Services Television. The system ties together digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasting with hard-disk-drive-based home servers and on-demand content available across broadband connections. In this future scenario, viewers will be able to enjoy either live or recorded programming, the latter from servers in the home or at the broadcaster.

The 'anywhere' part of the concept was demonstrated with a cell phone capable of receiving digital terrestrial television. Although handsets capable of receiving analog television are already on sale, this was the first time a telephone compatible with digital broadcasts was demonstrated in Japan.

A key part of NHK's future plans is the addition of metadata to video content that will allow viewers not only to call up missed programs but also specify only those parts in which they are interested. For example, a viewer could watch a baseball game but choose to see only the home runs, scan through a week's news for only political items or watch a drama but only the scenes with a favorite actor or actress.

NHK, which is working on adding MPEG7 XML metadata to video programs, demonstrated three technologies capable of inserting metadata at real time into broadcasts. The demonstration used a baseball game.

A voice recognition system analyzed and transcribed the commentary. A second facial recognition system scanned the broadcast pictures and identified when one of four baseball players was shown on screen, while a scene recognition system tried to determine what plays were taking place in the game by looking at the sequence of camera shots.

The systems being developed are useful in other areas too, said Simon Clippingdale, a senior research engineer at NHK.

The voice recognition system is already being used to add subtitles to live programming, such as news, while NHK hopes to employ the visual recognition systems to allow for fast searching and indexing of its vast video archives, which stretch back 50 years, he said.

Engineers here have been working for several years on a successor to today's high-definition television that offers around 16 times the resolution of current broadcasts. The system, called Super Hi-Vision, offers a 16:9 aspect ratio picture with 4,320 horizontal lines or roughly 4 times the number of lines and 16 times the resolution of current high-definition television. It also has a 22.2 channel audio system.

The cameras and projectors for the system each use four 8-megapixel image sensors. Video data is recorded on hard-disk with 3.2T bytes of space providing enough room for 18 minutes of video.

If such broadcasts are to be enjoyed in the home, new televisions will certainly be required. On that front, NHK is already researching technologies that go beyond current liquid crystal display (LCD) and plasma display panel (PDP) screens. These new technologies include a Field Emission Display (FED) and flexible LCD panels that are less than a millimeter thick. A possible application of such a panel is in a portable display that can be rolled-up into a case the size of a pen and unrolled whenever the user wants to watch television.

Televisions of the future might also be watching you.

Engineers have developed a system that does away with the remote control by monitoring the movement of a users eyes combined with on-screen selections and prompts, said Kenichi Aoshima, senior research engineer at NHK.

The demonstration, which showed programming from six TV channels in small boxes on a screen, could determine which of the six channels was drawing the viewer's attention. Details of the current program were then displayed, and the viewer could decide to watch the channel with a voice command.

Whether the systems and technologies under development become a part of broadcasting is yet to be seen. However, NHK's R&D labs have instrumental in the development of technologies now being used around the world.

Work on high-definition television, which began here in 1964, was first demonstrated to the public in 1969. NHK began high-definition program production in 1981 and satellite broadcasts using an NHK-developed analog format began in 1989. As a result of its early research, Japan is now a world leader in high-definition program production.