Colour signal transmission and reception

Three different systems of colour television (CTV) emerged after prolonged research and

experimentation. These are:

(i) The American NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) system.

(ii) The German PAL (Phase Alteration by Line) systems.
(iii) The French SECAM (Sequential Couleures a memoire) system.

When quality of the reproduced picture and cost of equipment are both taken into account, it
becomes difficult to establish the superiority of one system over the other. Therefore, all the
three CTV systems have found acceptance in different countries and the choice has been mostly
influenced by the monochrome system already in use in the country. In many respects
transmission and reception techniques employed in the NTSC and PAL systems are similar. These
are, therefore, treated together before going into encoding decoding details of each system. The
SECAM system, being much different from the other two,

COLOUR SIGNAL TRANSMISSION

Chrominance: (chroma or C for short) is the signal used in video systems to convey the color
information of the picture, separately from the accompanying luma signal (or Y for short).
Chrominance is usually represented as two color-difference components: U = B′ − Y′
(blue − luma) and V = R′ − Y′ (red − luma). Each of these difference components may have scale
factors and offsets applied to it, as specified by the applicable video standard.
In composite video signals, the U and V signals modulate a color subcarrier signal, and the result
is referred to as the chrominance signal; the phase and amplitude of this modulated
chrominance signal correspond approximately to the hue and saturation of the color.

Hue: the color itself is its hue or tint.Green leaves have a green hue a red apple has a red hue
the color of any object distinguished primarily by its hues results when different wavelength of
light produce the visual sensation in the eye.

Saturation: saturated color are vivid,intense deep or strong pale or weak color have little
saturation,saturation indicates how little the color is diluted by white for example vivid red is
fully saturated when the red is diluted by white the result is pink which is a disaturated red.note
that a fully saturated color has no white.
Chroma signal is transmitted by frequency interleaving method.
Frequency interleaving:
Frequency interleaving in television transmission is possible because of
the relationship of the video signal to the scanning frequencies which are used to develop it. It
has been determined that the energy content of the video signal is contained in individual
energy ‘bundles’ which occur at harmonics of the line frequency (15.625, 31.250 ... KHz) the
components of each bundle being separated by a multiplier of the field frequency (50, 100, ...
Hz). The shape of each energy bundle shows a peak at the exact harmonics of the horizontal
scanning frequency. This is illustrated in Fig. 26.1. As shown there, the lower amplitude
excursions that occur on either side of the peaks are spaced at 50 Hz intervals and represent
harmonics of the vertical scanning rate. The vertical sidebands contain less energy than the
horizontal because of the lower rate of vertical scanning. Note that the energy content
progressively decreases with increase in the order of hormonics and is very small beyond 3.5
MHz from the picture carrier.

It can also be shown that when the actual video signal is introduced between the line sync
pedestals, the overall spectra still remains ‘bundled’ around the harmonics of the line frequency
and the spectrum of individual bundles become a mixture of continuous portion due to the video
signal are discrete frequencies due to the field sync as explained earlier. Therefore, a part of the
bandwidth in the monochrome television signal goes unused because of spacing between the
bundles. This suggests that the available space could be occupied by another signal. It is here
where the colour information is located by modulating the colour difference signals with a
carrier frequency called ‘colour subcarrier’. The carrier frequency is so chosen that its sideband
frequencies fall exactly mid-way between the harmonics of the line frequency. This requires that
the frequency of the subcarrier must be an odd multiple of half the line frequency. The resultant
energy clusters that contain colour information are shown in Fig. 26.2 by dotted chain lines along
with the Y signal energy bands. In order to avoid crosstalk with the picture signal, the frequency
of the subcarrier is chosen rather on the high side of the channel bandwidth. It is 567 times one-
half the line frequency in the PAL system. This comes to: (2 × 283 + 1) 15625/2 = 4.43 MHz. Note
that in the American 525 line system, owing to smaller bandwidth of the channel, the subcarrier
employed is 455 times one-half the line frequency i.e., (2 × 227 + 1) 15750/2 and is
approximately equal to 3.58 MHz.

BANDWIDTH FOR COLOUR SIGNAL TRANSMISSION

The Y signal is transmitted with full frequency bandwidth of 5 MHz for maximum horizontal
details in monochrome. However, such a large frequency spectrum is not necessary for colour
video signals. The reason being, that for very small details, the eye can perceive only the
brightness but not the colour. Detailed studies have shown that perception of colours by the
human eye, which are produced by combinations of the three primary colours is limited to
objects which have relatively large coloured areas (≈ 1/25th of the screen width or more). On
scanning they generate video frequencies which do not exceed 0.5 MHz. Further, for medium
size objects or areas which produce a video frequency spectrum between 0.5 and 1.5 MHz, only
two primary colours are needed. This is so, because for finer details the eye fails to distinguish
purple (magenta) and green-yellow hues from greys. As the coloured areas become very small in
size (width), the red and cyan hues also become indistinguishable from greys. Thus for very fine
colour details produced by frequencies from 1.5 MHz to 5 MHz, all persons with normal
vision are colour bling and see only changes in brightness even for coloured areas. Therefore,
maximum bandwidth necessary for colour signal transmission is around 3 MHz (± 1.5 MHz).