Digital TV Applications Research Articles

Application test for betterment in the self-care of diabetic patients: a study in virtual messages under the NPT perspective

With the increase in chronic diseases that can be linked to bad habits, communication technologies improve the quality of life and health status of patients. We sought to understand how a digital TV application and Smartphones can improve care for e-Health intervention patients through persuasive content, increasing health literacy levels in people with diabetes through elements of the Normalization Process Theory (NPT). An experimental exploratory study was carried out, through quantitative and qualitative research, in three groups of patients with diabetes (28 in total - 10 in the Control Group, 9 in the Smartphone Group and 9 in the Digital TV Group), in Poços de Caldas, MG, Brazil, including 7 health professionals (4 dentists and 3 nurses) who deal with these patients in the municipality. The application was accepted in both groups by users and professionals, all the while showing a tendency of increasing the literacy and persuasion among the users. From the NPT perspective, the issues of implementing a complex intervention, its incorporation and optimization of systems showed themselves efficient for the betterment of self-care through the use of technology. It was noticed that the users' self-management of the disease and behavior improved; however, it was pointed out that the help and participation of healthcare professionals in needed for better credibility, persuasion, effectiveness and efficacy of the messages. It should be noted that they are content adjustments to improve literacy indicators.

A Low-Cost Printed Log-Periodic Dipole Array for DVB-T2 Digital TV Applications

A printed log-periodic dipole array (LPDA) for DVB-T2 Digital TV applications, covering the whole DVB-T2 UHF band from Channel 21 to Channel 69 (470 MHz–860 MHz), is presented. The presented antenna offers a compact size and a lower cost compared to both wire and similar printed LPDAs, with a normalized area of only 0.26 λ2 (where λ is the free-space wavelength at the central frequency) and a similar (or higher) average gain. It is composed of meandered radiating dipoles, and it is implemented on FR4, the cheapest dielectric substrate available on the market. Moreover, the antenna size has been reduced to an A4 sheet dimension (210 mm × 297 mm) to cut down the production cost. The antenna has been designed starting from Carrel’s theory and using a general-purpose 3D CAD, CST Studio Suite. The results show that the proposed antenna can be used for broadband applications (≈74% bandwidth) in the whole operating frequency band of Digital TV, with a satisfactory end-fire radiation pattern, a stable gain, and a radiation efficiency over the required frequency range (average values 6.56 dB and 97%, respectively).

Providing multimodal and multi-user interactions for digital tv applications

Providing multimodal and multi-user interactions for digital tv applications

Perceptual Video Quality Prediction Emphasizing Chroma Distortions

Measuring the quality of digital videos viewed by human observers has become a common practice in numerous multimedia applications, such as adaptive video streaming, quality monitoring, and other digital TV applications. Here we explore a significant, yet relatively unexplored problem: measuring perceptual quality on videos arising from both luma and chroma distortions from compression. Toward investigating this problem, it is important to understand the kinds of chroma distortions that arise, how they relate to luma compression distortions, and how they can affect perceived quality. We designed and carried out a subjective experiment to measure subjective video quality on both luma and chroma distortions, introduced both in isolation as well as together. Specifically, the new subjective dataset comprises a total of 210 videos afflicted by distortions caused by varying levels of luma quantization commingled with different amounts of chroma quantization. The subjective scores were evaluated by 34 subjects in a controlled environmental setting. Using the newly collected subjective data, we were able to demonstrate important shortcomings of existing video quality models, especially in regards to chroma distortions. Further, we designed an objective video quality model which builds on existing video quality algorithms, by considering the fidelity of chroma channels in a principled way. We also found that this quality analysis implies that there is room for reducing bitrate consumption in modern video codecs by creatively increasing the compression factor on chroma channels. We believe that this work will both encourage further research in this direction, as well as advance progress on the ultimate goal of jointly optimizing luma and chroma compression in modern video encoders.

Providing adjustable and dynamic spatial layouts for multimedia applications with STyLe

Interactive multimedia applications may be presented on multiple devices with different screen sizes. Therefore, application layouts should be adapted during runtime. Besides adapting layouts to different devices, the number of visual multimedia objects may vary, thus it is desirable to provide an automatic application layout adjustment to ease the authoring effort and provide good user quality of experience. In this article, the term adjustable layout is used to refer to an application spatial layout that adjusts itself to the number of media objects to be presented. The term dynamic layout is used to refer to an application spatial layout that can change at runtime in reaction to presentation events. Multimedia declarative authoring languages, such as NCL and SMIL, provide simple layout construction using nested rectangular regions to design the application layout. However, these languages do not provide native facilities for authors to develop adjustable and dynamic layouts. This article proposes STyLe, a constraint-based template language for providing adjustable and dynamic spatial layouts for multimedia documents. It also presents an architecture that is capable of interpreting STyLe when used together with NCL to provide dynamic layouts for interactive digital TV applications. The results show that STyLe has more expressiveness and abstraction when compared to NCL and that the language is simple and effective for building adjustable and dynamic layouts.

BMCLua

Lua is a programming language designed as scripting language, which is fast, lightweight, and suitable for embedded applications. Due to its features, Lua is widely used in the development of games and interactive applications for digital TV. However, during the development phase of such applications, some errors may be introduced, such as deadlock, arithmetic overflow, and division by zero. This paper describes a novel verification approach for software written in Lua, using as backend the Efficient SMTBased Context-Bounded Model Checker (ESBMC). Such an approach, called bounded model checking - Lua (BMCLua), consists in translating Lua programs into ANSI-C source code, which is then verified with ESBMC. Experimental results show that the proposed verification methodology is effective and efficient, when verifying safety properties in Lua programs. The performed experiments have shown that BMCLua produces an ANSI-C code that is more efficient for verification, when compared with other existing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that applies bounded model checking to the verification of Lua programs.

CPW-fed Wideband Loop Antenna for Indoor Digital TV Applications

CPW-fed Wideband Loop Antenna for Indoor Digital TV Applications

Extending multimedia languages to support multimodal user interactions

Historically, the Multimedia community research has focused on output modalities, through studies on timing and multimedia processing. The Multimodal Interaction community, on the other hand, has focused on user-generated modalities, through studies on Multimodal User Interfaces (MUI). In this paper, aiming to assist the development of multimedia applications with MUIs, we propose the integration of concepts from those two communities in a unique high-level programming framework. The framework integrates user modalities --both user-generated (e.g., speech, gestures) and user-consumed (e.g., audiovisual, haptic)-- in declarative programming languages for the specification of interactive multimedia applications. To illustrate our approach, we instantiate the framework in the NCL (Nested Context Language) multimedia language. NCL is the declarative language for developing interactive applications for Brazilian Digital TV and an ITU-T Recommendation for IPTV services. To help evaluate our approach, we discuss a usage scenario and implement it as an NCL application extended with the proposed multimodal features. Also, we compare the expressiveness of the multimodal NCL against existing multimedia and multimodal languages, for both input and output modalities.

Línea de Producto de Software para aplicaciones de TVDi basado en patrones de diseño

El desarrollo de aplicaciones interactivas para TV Digital (TVDi) de calidad y a escala industrial requiere estrategias específicas que se puedan aplicar al desarrollo. A partir de patrones de diseño de interacción centrados en el usuario, se propone la construcción de una Línea de Productos de Software (SPL) para aplicaciones TVDi. Una SPL es una modalidad de desarrollo software enfocada en potenciar la reutilización y los patrones de diseño de interacción que garantizan la usabilidad de los productos. Este trabajo presenta el modelo de características de una SPL para dominio de aplicaciones interactivas de TV Digital, la cual se validó con 32 prototipos que aplican los patrones de diseño de interacción centrados en el usuario.

A 2.7 mW/Channel 48–1000 MHz Direct Sampling Full-Band Cable Receiver

A direct sampling full-band capture (FBC) receiver for cable and digital TV applications is presented. It consists of a 0.18 μm BiCMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a 28 nm CMOS direct RF sampling receiver based on a 2.7 GS/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC) embedded in a system-on-chip (SoC). Digital signal processing (DSP) plays critical roles to assist analog circuits in providing functionalities and enhancing performances, including digital automatic gain control (AGC), digital phase-locked loop (PLL), and digital ADC compensation. The receiver is capable of receiving 158 256 QAM channels from 48 to 1000 MHz simultaneously, achieving up to 10 Gb/s data throughput for data and video while exceeding Data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) and Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) requirements. The CMOS receiver occupies $1 \text{ mm}^{2}$ area while consuming 300 mW. The LNA consumes 130 mW and occupies $3 \text{ mm}^{2}$ area. The total power dissipation from the receiver is 2.7 mW per 6 MHz channel when capturing the entire cable spectrum.

An Empirical Investigation Into Typing Errors in Interactive Digital Television Applications

Remote controls are especially problematic for writing text, something necessary in many interactive digital TV applications (IDTV). In the context of research aimed at finding effective entry methods for IDTV applications, an empirical investigation was carried out and is presented in this article. The study analyzed the errors committed by 82 users in an experiment in which they wrote 7,395 sentences. Several typing methods suitable for IDTV contexts were used for experimentation. There were 3,562 of the sentences that registered at least one error. These errors were classified and their main causes analyzed, the particular characteristics of the users taken into account. The results show that the most frequent errors are proximity mistakes in all the evaluated methods. They appear in between 13.75% and 32.31% of the sentences, depending on the input method. Also, age and background are major aspects affecting the number and type of mistakes. The results could be the basis of changes in the design of conventional remote controls or in the design of advanced techniques for error recognition and correction.

Information Extraction in Semantic, Highly-Structured, and Semi-Structured Web Sources

The evolution of the Web from the original proposal made in 1989 can be considered one of the most revolutionary technological changes in centuries. During the past 25 years the Web has evolved from a static version to a fully dynamic and interoperable intelligent ecosystem. The amount of data produced during these few decades is enormous. New applications, developed by individual developers or small companies, can take advantage of both services and data already present on the Web. Data, produced by humans and machines, may be available in different formats and through different access interfaces. This paper analyses three different types of data available on the Web and presents mechanisms for accessing and extracting this information. The authors show several applications that leverage extracted information in two areas of research: recommendations of educational resources beyond content and interactive digital TV applications.

A CMOS Wideband Highly Linear Low-Noise Amplifier for Digital TV Applications

<?Pub Dtl=""?> This paper presents a highly linear wideband differential low-noise amplifier (LNA) for digital TV applications. The proposed LNA is a modified version of the wideband LNA reported by Bruccoleri <etal xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> in 2004. In order to increase the linearity of Bruccoleri <etal xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> 's LNA, the Volterra series is adopted to identify the nonlinear components and the noise-cancelling circuit is modified to eliminate the whole nonlinear components. Implemented in 0.13- <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\mu{\hbox {m}}$</tex> </formula> CMOS technology, the proposed wideband LNA has a gain of 12.4 dB and a noise figure of 1.6 dB, as determined from measurements, while drawing 18.45 mA from a 1.2-V supply. The proposed LNA has an <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">${\rm IIP}_{3}$</tex></formula> of 16.6 dBm with 6-MHz frequency offset at 100 MHz, far exceeding the values of existing wideband LNAs.

Sparse Representations for Radar with MATLAB®Examples

Although the field of sparse representations is relatively new, research activities in academic and industrial research labs are already producing encouraging results. The sparse signal or parameter model motivated several researchers and practitioners to explore high complexity/wide bandwidth applications such as Digital TV, MRI processing, and certain defense applications. The potential signal processing advancements in this area may influence radar technologies. This book presents the basic mathematical concepts along with a number of useful MATLAB examples to emphasize the practical implementations both inside and outside the radar field.

Designing an extension API for bridging Ginga iDTV applications and home services

This paper presents the implementation process for an API that integrates interactive digital TV (iDTV) applications and home network (HN) services, mainly concerning issues of the Brazilian iDTV model. The research in this field is important because it represents current trends on the use of iDTV opening many business opportunities. With the convergence of service providers, modern communication technologies and consumer electronics devices at home, new iDTV applications have emerged, particularly those that use the set-top-boxes (or digital TV sets) processing power to provide additional services, which extends the possibilities of interaction between the user and the connected home. To implement this platform, a known model, which considers aspects of the Ginga middleware and the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework, was used. The idea behind the API model is to export service objects from one side to another, allowing the development of two types of applications: the first one on the Ginga-J machine and the last one on the Ginga-NCL machine. The main goals of this paper are (i) presenting the use of free tolls to perform such integration and (ii) showing the most relevant aspects in the core of the two models. Finally, a basic step-by-step process is shown in order to build integrated iDTVHN real applications using this platform.

Towards the application of interaction design to digital TV content development

Television can be considered one of the main means of mass entertainment. It occupies an important place in people's lives, influencing behavior and creating and/or enforcing consumer's habits and needs. With the advent of Digital Television, a series of new features tend to further impact upon society in many different ways. The main agent of this change is interactivity, which is the leverage that will transform the traditional viewer's role. Interactivity turns the viewer into a user, a partner who receives the content, but also produces, participates and collaborates during the viewing process. This paper aims to discuss the importance of applying interaction design in the development of projects related to digital television. The main factors that may contribute to improve the interaction design in applications for digital TV were identified drawing on a descriptive and qualitative method of investigation. The results showed that the interface design for this new media should not only be aesthetically appealing, but should also focus on usability (i.e. user's wishes and needs). Additionally, the creation of these interfaces requires the investigation of some characteristics and limitations of device interaction, considering the choice of colors, saturation levels and brightness, avoiding graphic symbols and prioritizing the navigation through the numerical buttons of the remote control.

Noise Canceling Balun-LNA with Enhanced IIP2 and IIP3 for Digital TV Applications

An inductorless low noise amplifier (LNA) with active balun for digital TV (DTV) applications is presented. The LNA exploits a noise cancellation technique which allows for simultaneous wide-band impedance matching and low noise design. The matching and amplifier stages in the LNA topology perform single-ended to differential signal conversion with balanced output. The second and third-order nonlinearity of the individual amplifiers as well as the distortion caused by the interaction between the stages are suppressed to achieve high IIP2 and IIP3. A method for intrinsic cancellation of the second-order interaction is employed to reduce the dependence of the IIP3 on the frequency spacing between the interfering signals in the two-tone test of DTV tuners. Fabricated in a 0.18µm CMOS technology, the LNA core size is 0.21mm2. Measurements show that the LNA IIP3 and IIP2 are +12dBm and +21dBm, respectively. The IIP3 variation is less than 5dB in the 10MHz to 200MHz frequency spacing range. A voltage gain of 14.5dB and a noise figure below 4dB are achieved in a frequency range from 100MHz to 1GHz. The LNA consumes 11mA from a 1.8V supply voltage.

CPW-Fed Wideband Printed Dipole Antenna for Digital TV Applications

A co-planar waveguide (CPW)-fed wideband printed dipole antenna is developed to fulfill digital TV applications. This antenna is designed with multiple loops to effectively extend the frequency range of operations. Additionally, the parameters associated with the proposed antenna structure are well investigated and adequately determined. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CPW-fed dipole antenna can operate at a frequency band from 430 MHz to 1180 MHz in which the return loss is better than 10 dB. The measured radiation patterns look like a dipole-type pattern. Particularly, the proposed antenna has a gain ranging from 1.78 to 2.83 dBi. Therefore, the antenna proposed herein is very suitable to various digital TV applications for high-performance receiving.

A Single-Chip RF Tuner/OFDM Demodulator for Mobile Digital TV Application

This paper presents a single-chip RF tuner/OFDM demodulator for a mobile digital TV application called “1-segment broadcasting.” To achieve required performances for the single-chip receiver, a tunable technique for a low-noise amplifier (LNA) and spurious suppression techniques are proposed in this paper. Firstly, to receive all channels from 470MHz to 770MHz and to relax distortion characteristics of following circuit blocks such as an RF variable-gain amplifier and a mixer, a tunable technique for the LNA is proposed. Then, to improve the sensitivity, spurious signal suppression techniques are also proposed. The single-chip receiver using the proposed techniques is fabricated in 90nm CMOS technology and total die size is 3.26mm × 3.26mm. Using the tunable LNA and suppressing undesired spurious signals, the sensitivities of less than -98.6dBm are achieved for all the channels.

StoryToCode: a new model for specification of convergent interactive digital TV applications

Abstract This paper presents a model, called the StoryToCode, which allows designing iTV programs focusing on using software components. First, StoryToCode allows transforming a storyboard into an abstract description of an element set. After this, this model transforms these elements into a specific programming language source code. In StoryToCode a software component is treated as a special element that can be reused in other contexts (web, mobile, and so on). StoryToCode is based on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and allows designing and implementing applications, with context free, considering iTV program specific characteristics.