Digital Video Signal Generator On FPGA

With the rapid development of digital technology, digital video products, such as video coding systems, video transceivers and monitors, have become the mainstream of current market. A professional testing equipment is needed to evaluate these products. However, most digital video signal generators in the markets have different defects, such as limit of test signals, lack of dynamic and special test signals. To overcome these problems, a new generator is designed and developed based on FPGA. The entire system is made of two parts, hardware platform and format conversion software. The hardware platform can work as an independent signal generator, which could send kinds of test signals. With the image format conversion software, the hardware platform can receive all kinds of static test images or dynamic test sequences from PC, updating its source library. The whole system have advantages of good hardware architecture, convenient input, stable output, flexibility in operating and updating.During the developing process, a variety of hardware and software development tools are put in use, such as Protel DXP, ISE, MODEL SIM, MATLAB, C #.NET.In addition, a special test signal used in evaluating H.264 codec compression distortion is designed. H.264 is one of the most attractive candidates among kinds of video coding strategy. But picture degradation is also not neglectable when using this coding method. There are two ways in evaluating the degradation, in subjective mode or objective mode. The subjective mode is better in direct and effect. However, it is difficult to observe such tiny degradation by use of common testing signals. In this paper, a special testing signal is designed, which can work to evaluate the degradation easily only by human eyes.