Abstract: A high definition television system that is characterized by low transmission bandwidth is achieved by removing redundancies in the signal, encoding the remaining signals, and transmitting the encoded signal in a manner that is most compatible with the applicable standards. In the encoding, groups of signals to be sent are mapped to codebook vectors and the identities of the codebook vectors are sent together with those signals of the groups of signals that correspond to the codebook vectors. To insure that the total number of signals that are sent does not exceed the available capacity, the signals are sorted by a selected importance parameter and assigned for transmission in descending order of importance until the capacity is exhausted. Signals that are not assigned for transmission are discarded.

Abstract: A high definition television system that is characterized by low transmission bandwidth is achieved by in a manner removing much of the redundancies in the signal, efficiently encoding the remaining signals, and transmitting the encoded signal in a manner that is most compatible with the applicable standards. Specifically, the television signal is encoded by developing motion vectors that describe the best motion estimate of the image to be transmitted, by developing motion estimation error signals, by encoding these error signals within the same bandwidth as occupied by standard NTSC signals and by transmitting the encoded error signals during periods that correspond to the active scan intervals of the NTSC TV signal. The motion vectors themselves, together with video and control signals, are transmitted during the NTSC retrace period.

Abstract: A high definition television system that is characterized by low transmission bandwidth is achieved by removing redundancies in the signal and encoding the remaining signals. In the encoding, a portion of the signals to be transmitted is created in the form of an analog signal or a concatenated plurality of pulse amplitude coded samples (A-signal), and another portion of the signals to be transmitted is created in digital form (D-signal). The D-signal is consigned to a specified portion of the transmitted signal, leaving the remainder of the transmission capacity for the A-signal. When the normally created digital signals do not fully occupy the digital portion, enhanced operation results when selected ones of the analog signals or samples are excised from the A-signal, encoded digitally, and added to the D-signal. The excising of those signals leaves room in A-signal portion to include additional analog signals. This leads to an overall better image reproduction at the receiver.