Video processor

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention utilizes an unusual combination of analog (surface wave acoustics) and digital (large scale integrated logic) techniques to surmount the problems of prior art systems for the general purposes aforementioned.
Although the present invention has broad application wherever a time (or location) weighted output (centroid) is required to be generated very rapidly and where small size, reliability and low cost are important, the specific application to be described hereinafter is based on an arrangement for locating the centroid of a TV scan line of signals, based on video levels.
Such systems are required in visual guided missile tracking equipment and elsewhere in the electronic arts.
Other applications of the present invention include real time processing of wideband video data and automatic real time generation of missile guidance signals using infrared, radiometric, or radar sensors as well as the aforementioned visual TV tracking arrangements.
In the real time processing of wide band video, the bandwidth can be much greater than the common 4MHz commercial television bandwidth, however, the parameters of the particular embodiment hereinafter described, are based on the common 62 microsecond television scan line.
Thus, each video repetition interval or TV scan line is 62 microseconds in duration.
The invention employs a surface wave acoustic delay line which comprises a piezoelectric substrate excited by an interdigital transducer excited from a video modulated radio frequency carrier source.
A large plurality of interdigital electrode pairs are spaced along the piezoelectric substrate material.
Each of these electrodes (or finger pair taps) picks up a voltage signal generated by the piezoelectric material as a result of its excitation from the input transducer.
Each of the said finger pair taps supplies a detector/weighting amplifier, and each of those amplifiers weights its output signal in accordance with its position from the center of the line