The Detection of Long Error Bursts During Transmission of Video Signals

Sophisticated techniques are available for removing redundancy in TV pictures.1,2 These reduce the cost of transmitting video signals over telephone lines, as, for example, in video-conferencing systems.3,4 The compressed video signal is represented in digital form and is protected by coding5 against the most frequently occurring channel errors.1 Certain other, less common, error patterns, however, are also detrimental to the system, causing the picture to disappear momentarily, a phenomenon that is annoying to the viewer. In this paper we describe a coding scheme that detects a class of error patterns that contributes to this degradation of the system. The scheme can also be used for other digital transmission systems where similar coding procedures are employed.