Design of a TV image digitizer for the minicomputer

Abstract

A generalized TV image digitizer is designed to accept a standard TV camera video signal, to digitize an arbitrarily selected window of a stationary image, and to put the digitized data into computer memory. The hardware is simple but powerful, and is controlled by the software. The hardware digitizes a line of video signal, stores the difitized data in the buffer memory, and gives the digitize-completed signal to the computer whenever digitizing of a line is completed. The software determines the digitizing window, initializes the hardware, accepts the digitize-completed signal, and move the data stored in the buffer memory to the computer memory. The digitizer can operate in either Single Mode or Double Mode. The Single Mode has a spatial resolution of 256 x 256, and the Double Mode has a spatial resolution of 512 x 512. The results are displayed on the TTY terminal.