U.S. Philips Corporation

Peter Saraga

David W Parker

Gerard M Fernando

Clive V Newcomb

Pieter Reijnierse

David R Humphreys

Barry M Jones

Philip R Lloyd

A television signal for a television transmission system conveys a motion information signal in addition to the vision signal. At the transmission side each field of a picture is subdivided into a plurality of regions and up to a given number of the most dominant motion vectors appropriate to a region are generated. These motion vectors are transmitted as the motion information signal and in a receiver are separated from the television signal in a decoder (12). The spatially offset pixels are identified in a first spatial offset circuit (14) from a vision signal delayed by a picture memory (16) and compared in a picture information comparison circuit (17) with pixels in the corresponding field of the current picture to identify the motion vector indicating the pixel of corresponding magnitude. This is applied to an input of a second spatial offset circuit (19) a second input of which receives the delayed vision signal to produce motion compensated pixels which together with pixels from the current vision signal are up-converted and interpolated in a unit (18) to produce an up-converted vision signal.

Method and apparatus for providing an enhanced television signal

In automatic assembly apparatus operating under electronic vision control, features on components to be assembled must be recognized and located in position and orientation so that a gripper mechanism may be directed to one component to pick it up and move it into correct position and orientation relative to the other component for assembly. The invention provides a known parallel projection optical system 8, 9, at the location of each component which provides a plan view for an electronic camera 11 of the components 20, 22 at constant scale regardless of lateral or axial component movements. The grey-level picture of each component provided by the camera is thresholded into a binarized picture at a threshold level which selects a primary component feature 27 within a part of the camera field of view which is certain to contain this feature. From the known location of secondary features 25, 26 and 38, 39, 40 of the component relative to the primary feature, successively limited search areas 35 and 41, 42 are set up within the camera field of view to select these secondary features when thresholded at levels related to the primary threshold. Sufficient features are thereby located in the camera field of view to provide position and orientation information on the component to a computer which directs the gripper 15 to assemble the components.

Automatic assembly apparatus

Character thinning apparatus for use in recognizing characters comprising means for applying a compound operator in cycles to each point of the binarized character on a first matrix, and means for rewriting, in each cycle, character points to which the compound operator is applied into corresponding positions in a second matrix in accordance with a compound test criterion.

Character thinning apparatus

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Wallington, United Kingdom

Peter Saraga