【Press Release】
KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc.
April 7th, 2011

Development of Codec Equipment Applicable for Real-time Transmissionof 8K UHDTV signals

KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc. has succeeded to develop a compact style codec equipment thatcan realize real-time transmission of 8K Ultra-high Definition Video (UHDTV) at extremely
high compression performance. By utilizing this equipment, the 8K content delivery is
possible over typical broadcasting network such as FTTH, CATV and satellite circuits. This
research was conducted under the research project, “Ultra-high definition video compression
coding technology”, organized by the National Instituteof Information and Communications
Technology, Japan.
Background
After wide acceptance of 3D as the consumer media, UHDTV is anticipated as the next
generation video application. Above all, the 8K UHDTV with the spatial resolution of 7680
pixles x 4320 lines as equivalent to 16 times of conventional HDTV is strongly expected.
Therefore, the research works to realize the large screen public viewing and the future
broadcasting service are conducted worldwide. For 8K UHDTV, the conventionaltransmission system was equipped at quite large scale because it was realized bymultiplexing compressed signals from HDTV encoders. Under the restricted transmission
capacity assumed for consumer broadcasting networks, the picture quality was notsatisfactory due to insufficient coding performance. Therefore, the development of a newcompression coding scheme and a corresponding codec system were strongly required.
Achievement
We established the proprietary coding technology for 8K UHDTV. Based on this technology,
the real-time codec system has been developed as hardware equipments. The employedvideo compression scheme is featured by originally extended coding functions under theframework of H.264 standard. As the compression performance, the satisfactory picture
quality can be maintained even at the bit-rate of 70Mbit/s. As for the codec system, wedeveloped the real-time codec system composed of encoder and decoder. The great advantage
is its compact style whose height is only 2U ( 8.8cm ) for encoder and decoder, respectively.
Furthermore, the system is implemented under the fully programmable architecture based-1-

on FPGA platform in order to achieve higher flexibility compared to the conventionalarchitecture dependent on a special purpose LSI.
Future Activity
After further enhancement of our coding scheme to achieve compression performance
improvement, a field trial of 8K UHDTV transmission via broadcasting networks is planned
for the live transmission from an event venue such as a stadium.

Center equipment Proprietary codec technology
Sufficient picture quality
at the bit-rate of 70Mbps

Home theater

8K Camera

CDN
Decoder

Encoder

8K TelevisionFilm material

Fig. 1 Assumed configuration of transmission system

HDTV (1920x1080)
Digital Cinema (4096x2160) ⇒ 4K Video

60Gbps (7680×4320, 10bit/pel , 60p, RGB)

Bit-rate [Mbps]

60000
300

Current: 150Mbps(Multiplex of H.264 HDTV)

200

KDDI : 70Mbps(Proprietary tech.)100

Uncompressed(Original signal)

8K UHDTV (7680x4320)

Conventional

Fig. 2 Comparison of compression performance-2-ＫＤＤＩ