Television signal bandwidth reduction using variable rate transmission

Claim 1

A television signal transmission system incorporating means for processing encoding a repetition reduce signal, said system comprising: a. a component separator for generating sampled digital values of the color and intensity components of a television signal, b. buffer storage means for storing the separated components of the video signal, c. data processing means for comparing successive samples of the component video data and for generating variable-length blocks of data to represent either slowly varying signals or rapidly varying signals, d. means for encoding and multiplexing audio and synchronization data into the signal stream, e. means for encoding signal and control data for transmission to a receiver, f. means for processing the received signal to establish synchronization, g. means for demultiplexing the received signal to extract the audio information, and h. means for demultiplexing the component video information and reconstructing the composite video signal from the repetition-reduced representation, wherein the signal data is divided into blocks containing a fixed number of input samples and whose output block sizes depend on signal content, and wherein a slowly varying input signal is represented by a reduced number of output samples, and a rapidly varying input signal is represented on a one-to-one basis at corresponding sampling points except where control information is introduced, and further wherein a block of n samples representing a slowly varying input signal succeeded by a block representing another slowly varying input signal is represented by the first and middle samples of the former block; or in the case of a block of n samples representing a segment of input data which is succeeded by a block representing rapidly varying data, the former block is represented by the first n-2 input samples while the last two input samples are replaced by rate-tags; the rate-tags are control signals which have a magnitude of 0 units when the output segment contains no more than two clock intervals or a full-magnitude when the output segment length is greater than two clock intervals.