MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF TELEMETRY VIDEO CODECS

Abstract

The Range Commanders Council has recently approved standard RCC 209-88 which defines the compression algorithms and communications frame structure for telemetry video coders. The compression algorithm is very flexible permitting the TV image to be encoded using either 2 bit or 3 bit DPCM, sub-sampled or not, coarse of fine quantizations. Any combination of these modes of operation can be selected and changed on a line-to-line basis. Each manufacturer of the video encoder will develop his own algorithms for selecting various modes of operations as the complexity of the picture changes. Clearly the picture quality produced by the encoder/decoder system will depend strongly on the mode control algorithm in the encoder. The purpose of this paper is to describe new test procedures which are required to measure the performance of encoders designed to meet RCC 209-88.