Samsung's April US Patent Describes Much of IP Behind HDR10+ Technology
Much of the intellectual property that's the basis of Samsung’s invention of the technology now called HDR10+ appears to be contained in a U.S. patent that Samsung’s Korean parent landed April 25, Patent and Trademark records show. Samsung coincidentally was granted the patent (9,635,377) five days after the company announced HDR10+ with Amazon Video as an “updated open standard that leverages dynamic metadata to produce enhanced contrast and colors on an expanded range of televisions” (see 1704200043).
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The patent was filed in stages between June 2013 and May 2014 and covers key aspects of HDR10+ as described at an HDR10+ workshop by a Samsung Research America executive (see 1709050030). Instead of upscaling or “stretching” a conventional standard dynamic range signal to simulate HDR, as is done on most Ultra HD TVs, Samsung’s method relies on additional metadata to describe each scene or frame, the patent said.
Samsung’s system uses far less metadata than that of Dolby Vision; the Samsung patent claims only a few kilobits per second are needed. Samsung’s metadata is of two types, “compulsory” and “optional,” the patent said. The compulsory metadata includes information on such criteria as maximum and minimum brightness and backlight peak brightness for each scene or frame, it said. The optional data includes “histograms,” showing the lowest, highest and most frequent pixel information and sharpness information, it said. During the Berlin briefing, the rep repeatedly stressed the value of coding histograms into the metadata.
The metadata are sent in packets stored inside a 10-bit base layer signal for backward compatibility, said the patent. A new HDR10+-capable TV will have look-up tables stored in its software that hold details of the set’s display capabilities, it said. So the metadata gets the best results available from each individual set, regardless of the brightness of its display, it said. HDR10+ uses Bezier transfer curves that smoothly convert digits to light, without having to switch between gamma and log transfer functions as is necessary for the BBC-NHK hybrid log-gamma to work for HDR broadcasts without metadata.
To minimize the amount of metadata needed, and to use up as little transmission or storage space as possible, only changes in the picture parameters are coded, said the Samsung patent. So if there's no change between picture frames, or even between scenes, no metadata -- even compulsory metadata -- is needed, it said. In this method, only about 20 bytes of metadata are required for each frame, and at 60 Hz a bandwidth of only 10 kbps is needed, it said. In practice, metadata will often be needed only for scene changes, so the data overhead may be as low as 1 kbps, said the patent. The rep had described the data overhead as “very minimal.”
Since Samsung announced just before IFA its plans with Fox and Panasonic to license HDR10+ royalty-free starting in 2018 (see 1708280018), speculation centered on what Samsung’s partners were contributing to the venture. The rep said Fox's is to be sure that "the picture quality on these TVs is the highest possible that we can get," using certification criteria to be developed in months to come.
As for Panasonic's role, we found patent filings from Panasonic that fit neatly with what Samsung’s executive suggested Panasonic was bringing to the HDR10+ table. Two very recent Panasonic U.S. applications (20170251245 and 20170251244) were filed in May and published Aug. 31, PTO records show. Both describe ways of decoding the signal and metadata, and managing the way it flows to the TV set. This is done by HDMI connection with HDCP for copy protection, the filings say.