October 17, 2012 at 12:00A simple way to transmit information through a video signal
Fujitsu offers an easy way to add interactivity to a regular television broadcast so that smartphone users without any additional technical devices (like all kinds of set-top boxes) can easily get additional information on the screen of their gadget.
The idea of transmitting information is quite simple and somewhat similar to the well-known QR scanning - that is, on a smartphone you need to run a special application and direct the device to the TV. A specially prepared transfer will contain video frames in which the TV screen becomes slightly brighter (or slightly darker): in other words, a sequence of successive video frames with different degrees of brightness will encode binary information in the video signal - each second will contain 16 bits.
What are the benefits for such an offer? Firstly, its cheapness, since the corresponding editing of video files will require relatively simple software that can be easily integrated into existing editors.
Secondly, for the end consumer of a TV broadcast, there is also no need to buy anything in order to receive information of interest to him, if he needs it. Thirdly, the implementation of the encoding described above has no effect on the transmission quality (or rather, it is not visible to the eye), so the picture quality will remain the same.
And finally, since, for example, in a news release, information can be transmitted for as long as you want (as a special marker may indicate), then there’s no need to grab a smartphone to be able to read the QR code, which serves for similar purposes, which, however, cannot be shown for a long time and which takes place in the picture of the video broadcast.
The original technology was designed by the Japanese to transmit checksums of video frames in the video signal to be sure that no one interfered with the broadcast and the consumer receives the original version of the picture, but the advertising idea interfered again and the new technology will begin to be applied as early as next year.
What the described encoding looks like is shown in the video below:
[ Source ]
The idea of transmitting information is quite simple and somewhat similar to the well-known QR scanning - that is, on a smartphone you need to run a special application and direct the device to the TV. A specially prepared transfer will contain video frames in which the TV screen becomes slightly brighter (or slightly darker): in other words, a sequence of successive video frames with different degrees of brightness will encode binary information in the video signal - each second will contain 16 bits.
What are the benefits for such an offer? Firstly, its cheapness, since the corresponding editing of video files will require relatively simple software that can be easily integrated into existing editors.
Secondly, for the end consumer of a TV broadcast, there is also no need to buy anything in order to receive information of interest to him, if he needs it. Thirdly, the implementation of the encoding described above has no effect on the transmission quality (or rather, it is not visible to the eye), so the picture quality will remain the same.
And finally, since, for example, in a news release, information can be transmitted for as long as you want (as a special marker may indicate), then there’s no need to grab a smartphone to be able to read the QR code, which serves for similar purposes, which, however, cannot be shown for a long time and which takes place in the picture of the video broadcast.
The original technology was designed by the Japanese to transmit checksums of video frames in the video signal to be sure that no one interfered with the broadcast and the consumer receives the original version of the picture, but the advertising idea interfered again and the new technology will begin to be applied as early as next year.
What the described encoding looks like is shown in the video below:
[ Source ]