Patent · US Expired

Digital wide camera

US6466262B1 · kind B1 · utility

62Cited by
17References
14Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateJun 9, 1998
Grant dateOct 15, 2002
Priority date
Expiry dateJun 9, 2018

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04N5/907
  • WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A digital wide camera is capable of forming, in real time, a wide view still image from a dynamic sequence of images generated during a recording operation by panning the camera to capture a scene. The camera shoots each frame of the sequence with a certain angular field of view at 30 frames per second, for example. The wide view still image has an apparent field of angular view that is greater than that of the image of each frame. The images of the sequence are connected together by determining a shift in position between adjacent images and then overwriting each image to a wide view image buffer after shifting the image by the shift amount. Determining the shift amounts and overwriting the image buffer is accomplished in less time than the interval between shooting consecutive images so that the display of the wide view image can be updated in real time for a user's observation. The amount of shift in position is determined using global pattern matching between adjacent images by taking the projections of the intensity values of the pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions of the images being compared. The projections are subjected to collation processing to identify the …

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.