APPARATUS FOR COMBINING AND SEPARATING CONSTITUENT COMPONENTS OF A VIDEO SIGNAL

The luminance component of a video signal is processed to produce a luminance component with groups of mutually exclusive spatially correlated image pixels of identical value within each group. In one embodiment each group comprises vertically averaged pixels 1H apart within a field. In another embodiment each group comprises vertically averaged pixels apart within a frame. The chrominance component is similarly processed. The processed luminance and chrominance components are combined using an invertible algorithm involving additive and subtractive signal combination. At a decoder, the inverse of the combining algorithm is used to separate the combined signal into its constitutent luminance and chrominance component parts, without luminance-chrominance crosstalk.