Entropy Coded Differential Pulse-Code Modulation Systems for Television

This concise paper describes experiments with a television source encoder which consists of a differential PCM encoder followed by entropy coding. This encoder converts analog television signals into a digital bit stream for digital transmission or storage. When optimized, this type of system is known to perform very close to the rate distortion bound. The differential PCM encoder has a 16-level quantizer during low entropy areas of the picture (quiet areas) but switches to a 6-level quantizer in high entropy (busy) areas of the picture which tend to fill up the buffer. This strategy avoids buffer overflow and has the desirable property that it produces low noise in quiet areas of the picture and higher noise in busy areas of the picture.