A new image acquisition system for an HDTV high-speed CCD camera is proposed to meet the increasing demand for HDTV slow-motion shooting equipment. The main idea of this system is to double the frame rate by using two CCDs driven with a half-frame offset. This concept was introduced in a four-chip color separating system. Each 1.3-million-pixel CCD is driven at 1.5 times the pixel-rate of a standard HDTV CCD. Therefore, the green signal acquired with two CCDs has three times the frame-rate of standard HDTV. The red and blue signals also have a tripled frame-rate at an acceptable sacrifice of vertical resolution. This technique has been applied to the development of an HDTV high-speed camera system. The system provided fine HDTV slow-motion images in the hookup for the Nagano winter Olympic games and proved the validity of our image acquisition system.
