Abstract: A circuit for detecting and synchronizing a ghost cancellation reference (GCR) signal in a television video signal, includes a circuit for receiving at least one field of an input video signal, a circuit for finding a maximum correlation peak value in a field of said input video signal, a circuit for scaling the maximum correlation peak value to a lower predetermined value for detection for forming a scaled peak value, a circuit for synchronizing a next field of the video signal using the scaled peak value, and a circuit for predicting a future position of the GCR signal.

Abstract: Instant replay is provided in the picture-in-picture portion of the television display without requiring compression and decompression techniques. A string of consecutive fields is received and decimated. A plurality of non-consecutive fields is selected and stored in DRAM. Fields are continuously stored until a user selects to view the last stored frames. The last stored frames are then replayed in the PIP portion of the television.

Abstract: In a ghost cancellation system, it is necessary to synchronize the system to the ghost cancellation reference (GCR) signal contained in the video signal. A free-running oscillation, having a frequency which is the same as that used in generating a reference GCR signal, is used to clock the sampling of the video signal. This assures frequency coherence between the input GCR signal and the stored reference GCR signal. By using cross-correlation, the phase error between the sampled input GCR signal and the stored GCR signal is determined. Based on this phase error, a phase-corrected reference GCR signal is generated and stored. This phase-corrected reference GCR signal is then used in the generation of an error function involving the sampled input GCR signal, the error function being used for eliminating ghosts in the input video signal.