For video surveillance, observed areas shall be presented in high resolution and has to be available near-term to the human observer on the ground. Therefore it is necessary to transmit high resolution HDTV video (1920x1080, PCM data rate 622 Mbit/s) over channels with very small bandwidth, typically around 1 Mbit/s. Standardized video codecs like AVC (Advanced Video Coding) can achieve bit rate reduction up to 10 Mbit/s without noticeable differences. However, further bit data reduction is needed.
The goal is to reduce the data rate of HDTV airborne surveillance video by an additional factor of ten compared to standardized AVC coding.
Instead of retransmitting areas of the video sequence which have already been transmitted in one of the preceding frames, only "new areas" are detected and transmitted. Additional ROI detectors can be connected to the system to detect for instance moving objects and transmit them additionally. A block diagram is
shown in Figure 1.