Error detection/correction and fault detection/recovery – Pulse or data error handling – Digital data error correction
Reexamination Certificate
1998-09-04
2001-06-19
Baker, Stephen M. (Department: 2133)
Error detection/correction and fault detection/recovery
Pulse or data error handling
Digital data error correction
Reexamination Certificate
active
06249895
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a system for transmitting and/or storing information through a medium of high error rate such as radio transmission path, and more specifically to a coding and/or decoding apparatus for coding a bitstream obtained by a high efficiency compression coding to an error correction and/or detection code and for transmitting and/or storing the coded bitstream.
In a system for transmitting audio and/or video signals via radio transmission path after the signals have been compression-coded at a high efficiency to reduce the signal quantity as small as possible, for instance as with the case of radio TV telephone, portable information terminal, digital TV broadcasting system, etc., since the error rate of the transmission path is relatively high, it is important to transmit the obtained bitstream in as high a quality as possible.
When the bitstream is transmitted and/or stored via a medium of high error rate as described above, an error correction code such as BCH code, RS code, convolution code, etc. has been so far widely adopted as means for reducing the error rate. On the other hand, as means for detecting an error on the reception side, an error detecting code such as check sum, CRC, etc. are used. In these error correction and/or error detection methods, error is corrected and/or detected by adding excessive (redundant) bits to information to be transmitted and/or stored in accordance with a prescribed rule and further by checking whether the transmitted and/or stored bitstream abides by the same rule when decoded.
However, in the above-mentioned method such that the bitstream obtained by high efficiency compression coding is further coded to an error correction and/or detection code and then transmitted and/or stored, there exists a problem in that it is difficult to combine this method with a resynchronization method for recovering a synchronization when synchoronization-loss occured due to an erroneous bistream word caused by the transmission and/or storage medium. Here, as the above-mentioned synchronization restoring method, there has been widely used such a method of inserting a unique word (referred to as synchronization code or start-code) decodable uniquely (unconditionally) and of resuming decoding operation, in case of synchronization-loss, from a time point when the synchronization code is detected again.
In order to form the synchronization code as a code word decodable unequivocally, it is necessary to construct the code word in combination with another code word in such a way that a bit pattern the same as that of the synchronization code will not appear. In the case of the general error correction and/or detection coding method, however, it is difficult to construct the code word in such a way that a specific bit pattern will not appear. On the other hand, when the bit pattern the same as the synchronization code appear, pseudo-synchronizatibn may occur due to an erroneous detection of the synchronization code.
To overcome this problem, conventionally, the following method has been so far used: after the error correction and/or detection coding has been executed, the presence of the bit pattern the same as that of the synchronization code is checked in the bitstream; when the same bit pattern exists, stuffing bits are inserted into the pattern in accordance with a prescribed rule; and the inserted stuffing bits are removed in accordance with the same prescribed rule by the decoding apparatus in order to prevent the pseudo-synchronization. In this method, however, when the bitstream having an error is transmitted and/or stored, since there exists a possibility that the stuffing bits are also inserted erroneously, there still exists another problem in that an additional synchronization-loss or pseudo-synchronization may occur.
Further, when the bitstream is coded for error correction and/or detection and further the synchronization code is inserted, in the conventional method, since many insertion bits must be added to the bitstream at the last portion of a synchronization block sandwiched between two synchronization codes in order to compensate for a remainder of the information bits to be coded for error correction and/or detection, there arises another problem in that the coding efficiency is lowered.
On the other hand, in order to increase the error correction and/or detection capability, although it may be considered to increase the redundancy of the information to be transmitted and/or stored, in this case, however, the number of necessary bits increases when the same quantity of the information is transmitted. Therefore, when the error correction and/or detection capability is simply increased, there arises another problem in that a transmission path of higher transmission rate is required or that the number of bits of information to be stored is increased. Further, when the transmission rate or the storage capacity is the same, the quantity of information to be transmitted and/or stored decreases with increasing redundancy. As a result, in the case where audio and video information are compression-coded at a high efficiency and then transmitted and/or stored, if the redundancy is simply increased to increase the error resistance, as far as the transmission and/or storage rate is the same, since the information must be compression-coded down to a lesser information quantity, there causes another problem in that the audio quality and picture quality both deteriorate.
To overcome the above-mentioned problems, as the method of obtaining a high error resistance in spite of a lesser redundancy, there exists a method referred to as hierarchical coding. In this method, the audio or picture information compression-coded at a high efficiency is classified according to the degree of error which deteriorates the audio quality or the picture quality; the error correction and/or detection code of a high redundancy and thereby a high error correction and/or detection capability is adopted for the information with more importance and a large error influence; and the error correction and/or detection coding of a low redundancy and thereby a low error correction and/or detection capability is adopted for the information with less importance and a small error influence. In this method, it is possible to increase the error resistance in spite of a relatively small averaged redundancy, as compared with when a correction and/or detection code is used uniformly for all the information in the same redundancy.
For instance, in the case of the coding method such that motion compensation prediction and the orthogonal transform are combined with each other (which is widely adopted for compression-coding moving picture information at high efficiency); that is, in the case of the coding method such that the motion compensation prediction is executed for the inputted moving picture video signals, and the predicted residual is orthogonal-transformed (e.g., discrete cosine transform (DCT)), the error correction and/or detection code of strong error correction and/or detection capability is used for the motion vector information or low-order coefficients of the orthogonal transform coefficients of the prediction residual signals (because these information deteriorates picture quality largely in case an error occurs); and the error correction and/or detection code of weak error correction and/or detection capability Is used for high-order coefficients of the orthogonal transform coefficients of the prediction residual signals (because these information exerts a relatively small influence upon the picture quality).
To realize the above-mentioned hierarchical coding, it is necessary to switch the error correction and/or detection codes of different error correction and/or detection capabilities midway in the outputted bitstream. As the method of switching the error correction and/or detection codings of different error correction and/or detection capabilities, there exists such a method that header information indicative of the sort o
Chujoh Takeshi
Dachiku Kenshi
Kikuchi Yoshihiro
Nagai Takeshi
Watanabe Toshiaki
Baker Stephen M.
Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner L.L.P.
Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
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