Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha Corporation

Yoichi Fujiwara

Hiroshi Kusao

Tomoko Aono

Hiroyuki Katata

Toshiyuki Miyake

Tadao Matsuura

Masaaki Hyodo

In a traveling apparatus, multiple first detectors and multiple second detectors are arrayed in an intersectant direction intersecting a travel direction where a vehicle body travels. The second detectors are separated in the travel direction from the first detectors. The first detectors and the second detectors detect a guide extending on a road surface. A first interval between two first detectors adjacent to each other in the intersectant direction is smaller than a second interval between two second detectors adjacent to each other in the intersectant direction.

Traveling apparatus

The present invention provides a motor-driven traveling device including: a vehicle body; a motor for travel driving that is capable of braking the vehicle body as a short brake or a dynamic brake; an electromagnetic brake that brakes the vehicle body, separately from the motor; an operation switching circuit that switches between causing the motor to perform travel driving and causing the motor to perform braking; a brake release switch that receives an operation pertaining to brake releasing of the motor and the electromagnetic brake; and a brake control circuit that, while the brake release switch is operated, controls the motor and the electromagnetic brake in response to the operation on the brake release switch.

Motor-driven traveling device

An apparatus is provided to reduce the memory capacity required to hold the data of a search area when motion vector detection is conducted in a wider area by using a plurality of motion vector detecting circuits. A motion vector detecting device includes an object pixel memory, reference pixel memory, motion vector detecting circuits, and a vector selecting circuit. Data of different blocks are provided to each of motion vector detecting circuits from the object pixel memory. Data of common search areas are simultaneously provided to the motion vector detecting circuits from the reference pixel memory. Output from each of the motion vector detecting circuits is processed by the vector selecting circuit to provide a motion vector in a search area which is wider than the search area of each motion vector.

Motion vector detecting device

In a motion-vector detecting device for detecting motion-vectors of images processed through a two-dimensional filter by a subsampling method, a filter circuit must process pixel values at a block boundary by delaying the pixel value in both horizontal and vertical directions, which complicates reading pixel data from memory and increases the size of the filter circuit. The present invention provides a motion-vector detecting device for detecting motion-vectors by searching a match of a coding block of a coding image with a prediction candidate-block in a searching area of a reference image. The invention further applies a one-dimensional filter for a coding block and a prediction candidate-block in a horizontal direction to restrict frequency bands of the blocks, and calculates a matching error-value between a part of the pixels in the band-limited coding block and a part of the pixels in the band-limited prediction block to detect a motion-vector, in calculating error-values for a group of pixels by the motion-vector detecting circuit, block-end pixels are considered to exist inside the block boundary by the number of pixels rounded off after a decimal point corresponding to one half of the number of taps of the spatial filters.

Motion-vector detecting device

The invention is directed to provide a code-amount control device for use in video-coding device, which controls the generated code-amount of each block (block length) after variable-length coding in the video-coding process to surely be less than the designated target code-amount. The code amount control device is provided with a rate control circuit for setting a target code-amount of each of blocks to be encoded, a rounding circuit for converting a sequence of quantized values into a set of the number of continuous zeroes and following thereto non-zero quantized values and a code-length table containing variable code-length values to be allocated to respective sets of the number of continuous zeroes and non-zero values. Before variable-length encoding of the image block, the rounding circuit estimates by accumulating the code length of each block with reference to the code-length table and outputs the quantized values as they are to a variable-length coding circuit when the accumulated code-length does not exceed the target code-amount. If the estimated code-length exceeds the target code-amount, the rounding circuit outputs the quantized values after rounding off the excessive portion thereof.

Code-amount control device and video coding device including the

A motion image coding apparatus providing enhanced image quality as compared with the prior art includes a coding unit for coding first, second and third frames, a prediction efficiency calculating circuit for calculating prediction efficiency in inter-frame prediction, in coding by the coding unit using said first or second frame as a reference frame, and a reference frame interval determining circuit for determining a reference frame interval which is a time interval between the first and second frames, time interval between the second frames and time interval between the first frames.

Motion image coding apparatus adaptively controlling reference frame

A moving image coder has a forward predicting motion vector/prediction error amount detecting section for detecting an optimum motion vector from a past frame, making a predicted image and calculating a prediction error amount from the present frame. The coder also has a backward predicting motion vector/prediction error amount detecting section for detecting an optimum motion vector from a future frame, making a predicted image and calculating a prediction error amount from the present frame. The coder further has a comparator/mode selecting section for inputting the prediction error amounts from the forward predicting motion vector/prediction error amount detecting section and the backward prediction motion vector/prediction error amount detecting section, making a comparative calculation of the input prediction error amounts, and selecting one of a forward prediction mode, a backward prediction mode and a bidirectional prediction mode.

Prediction mode selecting device in moving image coder

A moving image coder has an arithmetic unit for calculating an average value of a coding object block; an arithmetic unit for obtaining an alternating current component by subtracting the average value from each of pixel values of the coding object block; an arithmetic unit for obtaining a intra frame activity amount by making a calculation of the same kind as an error calculation in a motion prediction with respect to the obtained alternating current component; and a comparator for comparing the intra frame activity amount with a predicting error amount calculated when the motion prediction is made. The inter frame coding mode or the intra frame coding mode is judged by large and small relations of the predicting error amount and the intra frame activity amount. In this moving image coder, codings of a intra frame block and a inter frame differential block are adaptively switched in a small hardware scale.

Moving image coder

The prediction error value calculated by a motion estimating portion is used for selecting the frame or field orthogonal transform coding mode. The frame prediction error value EFr and the field prediction error value EFi are calculated by the motion estimating portion and entered into a comparator of an orthogonal transform mode selecting portion which in turn compares them with each other and generates an orthogonal transform mode selecting signal TC. The use of the prediction error values for selecting the orthogonal transform mode makes it possible to reduce the size of the necessary hardware and saves much time of data processing necessary for judgment of the orthogonal transform mode selection.

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Ichihara, Japan

Yoichi Fujiwara