Patent ID: 7518660

Claim:
A picture quality improvement device, said picture quality improvement device receiving as input an interlaced signal in which data of picture elements of adjacent rows are distributed between two field signals that are separated by time and transmitted, and emphasizing edges in a video image at a sampling clock frequency of said interlaced signal; said picture quality improvement device comprising: a first means for aligning phases of the two field signals that have been received as input; a second means for finding each of average values of data of the same order in data strings of the two field signals for which phases have been aligned by said first means and generating an average value signal having these average values as a data string; a third means for subjecting said average value signal to a two-dimensional low-pass filter process and eliminating frequency components having frequencies that are higher than a prescribed frequency; a fourth means for subtracting, from the data strings of said two field signals that have been received as input, the data string of said average value signal in which high-frequency components have been eliminated and that has been generated by said third means, and generating signals in which the high-frequency components have been extracted for each of the field signals; a fifth means for multiplying, by a prescribed factor, the signals in which high-frequency components have been extracted of each field signal that have been generated by said fourth means; and a sixth means for adding, to the data strings of said two field signals that have been received as input, the data strings of the signals in which high-frequency components have been extracted of each field signal and that have been multiplied by the prescribed factor by said fifth means.