Panasonic Corporation

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Panasonic Intellectual Property Corporation of America

Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co., Ltd.

Kenji Oka

Sotaro Tsukizawa

Atsuo Nagai

Kazuhiro Komatsu

Kazuki Hirata

Seiji Yoshida

Hirokazu Muramatsu

Tadashi Onomi

A system for controlling vehicle opening/closing element has a radiation block for irradiating near-infrared light to a peripheral region of an opening/closing element; a photographing block that photographs an image irradiated with the near-infrared light; a hand region extraction block that extracts a user's hand region from brightness of an image photographed by the photographing block; a motion detection block that detects motions of the user's hand from the extracted hand region; and a control block that determines whether or not the detected motions coincide with previously-set predetermined motions and that commands operation of the opening/closing element in accordance with the determined motions.

Apparatus for controlling vehicle opening/closing element

Disclosed is a pupil detection device capable improving the pupil detection accuracy even if a detection target image is a low-resolution image. In a pupil detection device (), an eye area actual size calculation unit () acquires an actual scale value of an eye area, a pupil state prediction unit () calculates an actual scale prediction value of a pupil diameter, a necessary resolution estimation unit () calculates a target value of resolution on the basis of the calculated actual scale prediction value, an eye area image normalization unit () calculates a scale-up/scale-down factor on the basis of the calculated target value of resolution and the actual scale value of the eye area, and normalizes the image of the eye area on the basis of the calculated scale-up/scale-down factor, and a pupil detection unit () detects a pupil image from the normalized eye area image.

Pupil detection device and pupil detection method

In a pupil detection apparatus, based on a calculated value of red-eye occurrence intensity that is relative brightness of brightness within a first pupil image detected by a pupil detector with respect to brightness of a peripheral image outside the first pupil image, and a correlation characteristic of red-eye occurrence intensity and a pupil detection accuracy value, a switching selector selectively outputs a detection result of the first pupil image or a detection result of a second pupil image detected by a pupil detector. The pupil detection apparatus has a first imaging pair including an imager and an illuminator separated by a separation distance, and a second imaging pair whose separation distance is greater than that of the first imaging pair.

Disclosed are an ambient light reflection determination apparatus and an ambient light reflection determination method enabling to determine reflection without using an edge and even in a case where luminance of a reflection generating part in eyeglasses is low. In a reflection determination apparatus (), a luminance histogram calculation section () calculates a luminance histogram representing a luminance distribution of an eye area image, a difference calculation section () calculates a difference histogram by finding a difference between the two luminance histograms calculated from the two eye area images having different photographing timings, an evaluation value calculation section () calculates an evaluation value regarding reflection of ambient light based on the difference histogram and a weight in accordance with luminance, and a reflection determination section () determines the reflection of ambient light based on the calculated evaluation value.

External light glare assessment device, line of sight detection device and external light glare assessment method

A pupil detection device and a pupil detection method, which are capable of stably detecting the pupil by actively using information of cornea-reflected image even when most of the pupil is hidden by the cornea-reflected image. In pupil detection device (), peripheral state evaluating section () sets a plurality of line segments having a reference point of a cornea-reflected image as one end and having a predetermined length, and calculates a luminance evaluation value based on luminance of each pixel in each line segment and reference luminance. Pupil center straight line calculation section () specifies a pupil center straight line passing through a center of a pupil image from among a plurality of line segments based on a luminance evaluation value. Pupil search section () detects a pupil image based on a luminance state around the pupil center straight line.

The visual line estimating apparatuscomprises: an image inputting sectionoperable to take an image of a human; a visual line measurement sectionoperable to measure a direction of a visual line on the basis of the taken image; a visual line measuring result storing sectionoperable to store therein visual line measuring results previously measured; a representative value extracting sectionoperable to extract a previous representative value; and a visual line determining sectionoperable to judge whether or not a difference between the representative value and the visual line measuring result is lower than a predetermined threshold to determine a visual line estimating result from the representative value and the visual line measuring result.

Visual line estimating apparatus

A dielectric ceramic composition containing at least 0.15 to 2.5 mol of a Mg compound in terms of MgO, 0 to 1.6 mol of a Ba compound in terms of BaCO, 0.1 to 3.0 mol of a Ln (Ln includes two or three kinds of elements selected from Er, Dy, and Ho with Er being essential) compound in terms of LnO, 0.01 to 0.4 mol of a Mn compound in terms of MnO, 0.01 to 0.26 mol of a V compound in terms of VO, 0.3 to 3.5 mol of a Si compound in terms of SiO, and 0.01 to 2.5 mol of an Al compound in terms of AlOto 100 mol of barium titanate adjusted for a Ba/Ti molar ratio of 0.997 to 1.007.

Dielectric porcelain composition, and method for manufacturing capacitor using the same

A method of manufacturing a multilayer ceramic capacitor includes the steps of: preparing a mixture of a raw material powder mainly composed of barium titanate particles; forming the mixture and a binder into a green sheet; alternately layering the green sheet and an internal electrode to obtain a laminated body; and sintering the laminated body. The step of preparing the mixture includes the steps of: introducing the raw material powder and the dispersion medium into a mixing container, and stirring them with balls serving as a mixing medium, to obtain a slurry containing a raw material powder mixture; and drying the slurry. The mixing medium has a diameter that is equal to or less than 400 times the mean particle size of the barium titanate particles of the raw material. The present invention provides a multilayer ceramic capacitor having good DC bias characteristics by suppressing the variation in crystal particles.

Method for manufacturing multilayer ceramic capacitor

The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a multilayer ceramic capacitor, having the steps of: (a) alternately layering internal electrodes and ceramic green sheets containing a ceramic material having barium titanate to form a laminated body; (b) sintering the laminated body to obtain a sintered body; and (c) forming an external electrode on end faces of the sintered body to obtain a multilayer ceramic capacitor. The barium titanate has a diffraction line derived from (002) plane and a diffraction line derived from (200) plane in an X-ray diffraction chart. The ratio I/Iof peak intensity Iat 2&#x3b8;to diffraction intensity Iat a midpoint angle between peak angle 2&#x3b8;of the diffraction line derived from the (002) plane and peak angle 2&#x3b8;of the diffraction line derived from the (200) plane is 2 to 10. The product r&#xb7;Sa of mean particle size r (&#x3bc;m) of the barium titanate and specific surface area Sa (m/g) is 1 to 2.

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Kanagawa, Japan

Kenji Oka