Method and apparatus for advanced television signal encoding and decoding

摘要

The specification discloses a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding advanced television signals using standard MPEG-2 compression engines while maintaining the compression efficiency of such compression engines. The architecture provides parallel processing using standard MPEG-2 compression engines in an overlapping arrangement that does not sacrifice compression performance. A video encoder includes plural regional processors for encoding an input stream of video images. Each video image is divided into regions that have overlapping portions, with each processor encoding a particular region of a current video image in the stream. The regional processors each store a reference frame in a local memory based on a prior video image in the stream for use in the motion compensation of the encoding process. A reference frame processor coupled to the plural local memories updates each reference frame with information from reference frames stored in adjacent local memories. The encoded video images are made up of macroblocks and each regional processor includes means for removing certain macroblocks from the encoded video images that correspond to the overlap portions and concatenating the resulting encoded video images with that of other regional processors to provide an output video stream.