AMOUNT OF INFORMATION IN A STILL-PICTURE AND THE DISPLAY TIME REQUIRED.

In a still-picture television or teletext system the display time cannot be shorter than a certain limit determined by the amount of information on the picture, as the viewer has a limited capacity of picture-content apprehension. The author of this paper proposes a method to estimate the amount of information contained in a still picture and investigates still pictures in a television news program. The relationship between the amount of information in the pictures and the time they were displayed in an actual bulletin is derived, and the results are compared with information processing capacity of human beings estimated by means of subjective tests. This is followed by a comparison of various information rates, defined as the ratio of the amount of information and display time.