Television system for displaying and recording paths of motion

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The primary object of the present invention is to improve the viewability of a television display of the kind described above, particularly in situations in which multiple successive paths of motion of the object whose motion is to be portrayed tend to crisscross each other, or in which the viewer would be interested in only a limited number of images preceding the current image of a moving object.
Briefly, this object is achieved by a system similar to those described in the aforementioned copending applications in that it includes a reference field store for storing video representing a scene at the start of an action cycle, a comparator for comparing picture elements of selected subsequently arriving television fields with corresponding picture elements of the stored reference field, and means for tagging and storing those picture elements of the selected subsequently arriving fields shown by the comparison to be measurably different from corresponding picture elements in the reference field.
However, whereas the action cycle of the previous systems is terminated by the operator, at which time there is provided a video signal for display representing the substantially static scene with the substitution therein of those picture elements stored during the selected time period, in the present system the action is live and continuous, with a preselected amplitude proportion of the tagged picture elements mixed with a complementary amplitude proportion of the real time video, thereby to cause the tagged picture elements to decay in amplitude at a selectable rate.
The system operates in a recursive mode thereby to cause earlier images of the moving object each to decay by a predetermined amount with each sampled mix of a subsequently arriving field and the stored field, and causing earlier images to decay into the background of the scene.