Hitachi, Ltd.

Hiroyuki Hanyu

Nobukazu Doi

Seiichi Mita

Takeshi Hoshino

Morishi Izumita

Yoshizumi Eto

Masayuki Ohki

Yuhei Abe

Atsuhiko Urushibara

A card holder provides a balance reader for an IC card utilized for a system for settling cash utilizing the IC card. The balance reader is provided with the card holder-type body having a card slot provided in the body. A liquid-crystal display and at least one push-button are arranged on the body for user interface. A cover member is attached to the body via a hinge so that it can be opened or closed. When an IC card is inserted into the body and the push-button is pressed, the liquid-crystal display is lit and the current balance of currency is displayed on the liquid-crystal display. When the cover member is opened and the IC card is extracted, the display of the balance is switched to a blinking display. When a settlement is performed using the IC card, a microcomputer in the body can operate to display the balance after the settlement as well as a paid or received amount, in addition to the previous balance before the settlement.

Card holder-type balance reader

An adaptive transform encoder can keep a recording rate of a digital signal at a constant level. It comprises a unit for orthogonal-transforming one block of digital input signal, a unit for calculating an activity index of the orthogonal-transformed block, a unit for comparing the activity index of the block with a predetermined reference, a unit for classifying the block to a standard bit class having a predetermined number of bits when the activity index of the block is equal to the reference, classifying the block to a low bit class having a smaller number of bits than the predetermined number of bits of the standard bit class when the activity index of the block is smaller than the reference, and classifying the block to a high bit class having a larger number of bits than the predetermined number of bits of the standard bit class when the activity index is larger than the reference, a quantization unit for quantizing the input signal of the block with the number of bits designated by the bit class, a unit for selecting the block of the low bit class from the quantized blocks, an allocation unit for adding to the selected block of the low bit class the data having more bits than the number of bits of the standard bit class of the block of the quantized high bit class, and an encoder unit for encoding the quantized block signal.

Adaptive transform encoder for digital image signal in

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Hitachinaka, Japan

Hiroyuki Hanyu