The IRT is the central research and development establishment for public broadcasting organizations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. IRT has extensively used Tektronix picture quality analysis systems for some time and was looking for a next generation high-performance reference system for HD. The PQA500 will be used by several departments for a wide range of projects including the evaluation of compression formats for studio production, contribution and distribution. It will be used for German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF projects, for European Broadcasting Union (EBU) working groups and also for third party projects with codec manufacturers.
"Tektronix picture quality analyzers are well-established systems within IRT; they form a state-of-the-art reference system for automated quality assessment," said Dr. Rainer Schaefer, Head of Production Systems, TV, IRT. "When we looked for a similar reference system for HD, support for algorithms beyond PSNR and JND was important to us, as well as file I/O to analyze material already recorded by other servers. The PQA500 will speed up quality evaluation and will save on human resources, effectively steering those resources to other key issues. There is simply nothing comparable available in the market."
"We are very pleased that an institution with the reputation and credibility of the IRT has taken the decision to further their research in the field of picture quality analysis with our PQA500," said Arif Kareem, Vice President and General Manager, Video Test, Tektronix. "Tektronix is committed to providing key tools to the broadcast industry that provide ground breaking performance and allow major steps forward in the productivity and quality of codec design and performance."
The PQA500 is the latest-generation picture quality analyzer. Based on the concepts of the human vision system, the PQA500 provides a suite of repeatable, objective quality measurements that closely correspond with subjective human visual assessment. These measurements provide valuable information to engineers working to optimize video compression and recovery, and maintaining a level of common carrier and distribution transmission service to clients and viewers. -Tektronix
