Inventors:
Yau Chau Ching - Morganville NJ
Assignee:
Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated - Murray Hill NJ
International Classification:
H04N 504
Abstract:
In a digital transmission system that encodes each sample of a video signal into a variable bit length data word to form a consecutive stream of variable bit length data words, synchronization between the received data words and their properly associated spatial addresses is maintained by periodically interposing synchronization words into the transmitted data stream. After initialization at the beginning of a video field, each picture element along each active scan line is consecutively sampled and encoded into a variable bit length data word. Each scan line is divided into segments having a predetermined number of sample positions included therein. A word counter cyclically counts each sample as it is encoded to provide a representation of the horizontal position of each code word within a segment along a scan line. The relative horizontal position of each code word is thus represented by the count of the word counter. The cumulative number of bits in the data stream is simultaneously cyclically counted as each sample is encoded.