From the standard to the industrial 4K ultra-high definition such as "quenched" - remember the first prize of the National Technology Invention Award ultra-high-definition video polymorphic primitive codec key technology

From standard to industrial 4k ultra-high definition is "hardened"

——Remember the first prize of the National Technological Invention Award, the key technology of ultra-high-definition video polymorphic primitive codec

When it comes to 4k Ultra HD, exciting events, what comes to mind?

On October 25, CCTV Olympic Channel (CCTV-16) of the Central Radio and Television Corporation was launched, which is the first professional sports channel in the world to broadcast simultaneously on the star in 4K ultra-high definition and high-definition standards for 24 hours. Behind this, it is inseparable from the strong support of the standardization of digital video and audio codec technology (AVS) independently developed in China.

On November 3, the 2020 National Science and Technology Awards Conference was held in Beijing, and Gao Wen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Peking University, stood on the podium of the Great Hall of the People and accepted the first prize of the National Technological Invention Award on behalf of the R&D team of the key technology of ultra-high-definition video polymorphic primitive codec.

The research team invented the frame block-pixel multi-scale primitive progressive coding method, breaking through the bottleneck of efficiency improvement of traditional coding; independently developed the ultra-high-definition video decoding chip architecture, released the ultra-high-definition decoding chip 8k@120p for the first time in the world; led the formulation of China's ultra-high-definition video coding standard gbt33475.2-2016, which was adopted as an international standard, breaking the hollowing out of the core patent of video coding in China...

How is the complete industrial chain from technology to application of this seemingly advanced project "hardened"?

Break the deadlock break through key technologies from codecs

The so-called ultra-high-definition video is a new generation of video with 4k or 8k resolution, which conforms to the five-dimensional information system such as high frame rate, wide color gamut, high depth, and high dynamic range, and is a new round of major technological innovation after digitization and high definition.

"The codec technology we do is to encode the programs of the TV station, compress it to one-tenth or even one hundredth of the original, and transmit it to thousands of tv stations through the network." Before the conference, Gao Wen said in a collective interview that efficient coding is very important, and it is related to faithfully restoring the program to the TV terminal.

For example, Gao Wen said, just like you see a beautiful fish tank in the mall, you want to take it home, one way is to take the fish tank with water and fish, but the cost and risk are greater. Another option is to leave the least amount of water, transport the fish tank to the house and then fill it with water.

"The key technology of ultra-high-definition video polymorphic primitive codec is the basic core of the ultra-high-definition video industry chain, running through the three major links of content production, network transmission and terminal display." Gao Wen explained that if the network transmission is compared to the process of "pumping", the terminal display is the process of "irrigation". The technical challenge is to figure out which are water, which are fish, and what is useful and which are not, which requires algorithmic support.

Unfortunately, China's research on video codec standard technology started late, and the core technology has been controlled by foreign countries for a long time, resulting in the industry being subject to people.

"Like the key chips in TVs and set-top boxes, the algorithms inside the chips were basically controlled by foreign countries before 2000, and we could only do simple assembly." Speaking of underlying algorithms, Gawain's memories go back 20 years.

In 2002, when a batch of DVD players produced in China went to Europe to participate in the exhibition, they were confiscated by the patent police as soon as they entered the customs, and a certificate of payment of intellectual property fees was issued. At that time, the maritime destabilization fee was more expensive than the intellectual property fee to be paid, and neither fee could be paid, so Chinese DVD companies threw these containers into the sea.

This incident caused The Chinese DVD industry to collapse. At the end of that year, the former Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Information Industry issued a document to formally establish a digital video and audio codec technology standardization working group, with Gao Wen as the leader, and a new chapter in the coding technology standards of China's independent intellectual property rights was opened.

"After years of continuous scientific research, we have turned theoretical algorithms into technical standards, achieved standards in chips and terminals, and finally promoted large-scale system applications." For the formation of a complete technology industry chain, Gao Wen said in a word.

Ten years of research to create a complete industrial chain of ultra-high-definition video

Since 2008, the video data brought about by the Internet era has increased dramatically, and higher resolution video has become a new demand trend, which also poses new challenges to encoding performance and compression efficiency.

To this end, Peking University and relevant enterprises and scientific research units, with the continuous support of national key projects such as the 973 Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China Innovation Group, have built a complete technical system of ultra-high-definition video codec with independent intellectual property rights after more than ten years of scientific research.

In Gao Wen's recollection, whether it is a technological breakthrough or a standard setting, a big noisy scene in March is indispensable. In the process of technology landing, the scientific research team should consider the user experience and also consider the cost.

"From 2k to 4k to 8k video, the project team continues to face the 'ceiling' of technology, and the current 8k video has basically reached the limit of technology." He said that every time the complexity is added, the amount of data also doubles, but the cost does not increase accordingly every time, which requires technical overcoming of many problems and the cost of driving down.

For more than a decade, in the midst of a blushing and thick-necked debate, the truth became clearer and clearer.

In May 2016, avs2 was promulgated as a radio and television industry standard, and at the end of the same year, it was promulgated as a national standard; in April 2018, the Global Ultra HD Alliance adopted avs2 as an international standard; in 2019, China took the lead in releasing a new generation of coding standards for 8k ultra-high definition, opening a new era of video coding standards leading the international development.

While leading the codec standard technology, the project invention technology has also successfully landed chip products. In 2006, China's codec chip shipments accounted for only 1%; 10 years later, this figure has been raised to 62%. In 2019, HiSilicon launched the world's first 8k-120 frame rate ultra-high-definition decoding chip based on the avs3 standard, leading a new round of codec chip industry upgrading and creating a new situation in the global leading development of China's ultra-high-definition video industry.

After more than ten years of efforts, Gao Wen led the project team to establish a complete industrial chain of ultra-high-definition video from technical standards to chip terminals to system applications, which has been widely used in radio and television, terminal manufacturing, Internet and other fields.

According to the data, the results have been applied to Skyworth, Hisense, Tencent and other company products, in the past three years, chip sales of 190 million pieces, direct economic benefits of 7.109 billion yuan, driving the industrial scale of nearly 100 billion.

"At present, the high-definition video industry has exerted a significant impact in many fields, including intelligent transportation and smart medical care." Ding Wenhua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, believes that it is foreseeable that the coordinated development of ultra-high definition and 5G in the future will become the core engine of China's new digital infrastructure. (Reporter Liu Yan)

Source: Science and Technology Daily