Abstract: According to the technique characteristic and frame structure of the China national standard for digital television terrestrial broadcasting system, a carrier synchronization scheme based on the pseudo noise (PN) frame header was presented. After the acquisition of PN frame header, the same PN sequence was recovered at the receiver. Based on the sub-sequence correlation result, the frequency offset was first calculated, and then the phase error was corrected according to the correlation peak. This synchronization method suits three types of PN frame header of digital television (DTV) system, and suits both single carrier and multi-carrier structure. The theory of the algorithm was given and the simulation was performed. The result shows that this method has the superiority of fast synchronization, anti-noise and simple hardware design. This synchronization scheme has been used in the DTV receiver.