Development of real-time encoder for 8K ultra-high definition television

8K ultra-high definition television, whose spatial resolution is 8,000 × 4,000 pixels, is expected as the next generation video application. Concerning the transmission of such high resolution video, two technical problems remain unsolved. One is unsatisfactory picture quality under the practical bit-rate such as 100 Mbps, and the other is implementation difficulty of real-time codec equipment at a practical scale. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes key coding technologies required to achieve sufficient coding performance for 8K resolution at the bit-rate close to 100 Mbps. Furthermore, the distributed system architecture of a video encoder process is proposed with the actual prototype by utilizing general-purpose FPGA processors. Experimental results confirm that the developed encoder achieves up to 26% bit saving against H.264 as well as stable real-time operation of 8K resolution coding.