Chapter 20
Video fundamentals
What Will We Learn?
- What is an analog video raster and what are its main components and parameters?
- What are the most popular analog TV and video standards?
- What is digital video and how it differs from analog video?
- What are the most popular digital video standards?
- How is color information encoded in analog and digital video systems?
- How can we read, manipulate, and play digital video files in MATLAB?
20.1 Basic Concepts and Terminology
In this section, we present a list of technical concepts and terms used in analog and digital TV and video systems.1 Similar to what we have done earlier (Section 1.2), this section is structured in a question-and-answer format in a sequence that starts with relatively simple concepts and builds up to more elaborated ones.
What is a Video Signal?
A video signal is a one-dimensional (1D) analog or digital signal varying over time whose spatiotemporal contents represent a sequence of images (or frames) according to a predefined scanning convention. Mathematically, a continuous (analog) video signal will be denoted by 
, where t is the temporal variable.
An analog video signal refers to a 1D electrical signal 
obtained by sampling in the vertical and temporal dimensions. A digital video signal is also sampled along the ...
