Panasonic Corporation

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Natsushi Ono

Takashi Kubara

Toshimichi Tokuda

Ryoichi Yuge

A voice conference apparatus includes a sound collecting unit and a loudspeaker, while the sound collecting unit has a directional polar sensitivity characteristic which has a higher sensitivity with respect to sounds which are radiated from at least one direction, as compared with sounds radiated from other directions. The sound collecting unit of the voice conference apparatus has a plurality of omnidirectional microphones, and forms a desirable sensitivity characteristic. Since the omnidirectional microphones are employed, aging changes and fluctuations contained in the sensitivity characteristics of the respective sound collecting units can be reduced, so that the sensitivity characteristics thereof can become stable, and thus, full duplex communications with higher qualities can be carried out.

Conferencing apparatus for echo cancellation using a microphone arrangement

A projection-type three-dimensional image display apparatus includes a projector, a screen and an image former. The projector projects a plurality of element images containing parallax information to a two-dimensional plane. An image is formed on the screen, of a light transmittance that is electrically controlled by the projector. An image former forms a three-dimensional image having a vertical parallax and a horizontal parallax in a space in front of the screen from the projection image.

Three-dimensional image communication terminal and projection-type three-dimensional image display apparatus

It is possible to provide a three-dimensional image display apparatus which can reproduce a three-dimensional image having an appearance of solidity with a simple configuration. The three-dimensional image reproduction apparatus includes: a display devicefor displaying two-dimensional element images having a plurality of horizontal and vertical parallax imagescontaining information on a parallax and an image at the time of reproducing a three-dimensional solid image; and a lensfor forming the three-dimensional solid imageat a predetermined spatial intersection from the element images displayed by the display device. Here, the lensdiffracts the element images and forms the three-dimensional image by the use of a diffraction effect when the element images are emitted from the display device

A disc player includes a reproducing parameter setting/extracting unit, a reproducing state monitor, a reproducing parameter storage unit for storing a reproducing position, a number-of-loadings counter, and a controller for controlling them. The controller, during reproducing, saves information related to a reproducing position into the storage unit, and initializes the counter. In turning on the power, the controller refers to the counter, interprets that contents in the storage unit are ineffective when the value of the counter is 0, and performs resume play when the value is not 0. Thus, a disc player for avoiding repeating of lock is provided. A similar effect can be obtained even when an effective flag for indicating whether contents of the reproducing parameter are effective or a just-after-loading flag for indicating whether it is just after reading the reproducing parameter is used instead of the counter.

Disc player and method of preventing lock of its resume play

In image compression utilizing wavelet conversion for dividing an image of one screen into subbands through multiple steps, subband data of a higher frequency is predicted from subband data of a lower frequency, subtraction is carried out between data obtained by the prediction and an actual higher-frequency subband coefficient at the same position as that for the predicted data to provide a difference, and only the difference is coded. By coding only the difference in this manner, a high compression ratio can be realized.

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Fukuoka, Japan

Natsushi Ono