The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 27, 1987
Filed:
Jun. 30, 1986
Shigeki Asada, Kanagawa, JP;
Hiroshi Yanagisawa, Kanagawa, JP;
International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
The invention directly controls the start of application of clock pulses to a shift register of an image sensor unit in synchronism with read signals supplied from a processor unit, to transfer video data of successive scan lines of an image. Transfer time of video data of one scan line from the shift register to the processor unit is compared to a predetermined time period. If the transfer time exceeds the predetermined time period, transfer of video data of the next scan line to the shfit register is allowed after the video data of the one scan line in the shift register has been transferred to the processor unit, whereby electric charges for the next scan line accumulated in the photodiodes are vanished. And, the video data of the next scan line in the shift register is discarded. In addition, the invention is devised to provide a data disposing cycle in the operation mode of the shift register in addition to the data reading cycle, so that, even when interruption from others causes the operation of the processor fetching the video data from the shift register to exceed a predetermined scanning time before completion of the operation, the data disposing cycle is inserted right after completion of the operation to disposed high level data that has been sensed for a long period of time by a photosensor of the sensor unit, and normal level data or image information properly representing an image being scanned is obtained. Furthermore, the invention reduces significantly the processing load of the processor with a simple hardware constitution by adding the operation of a run length counter, etc., so as to enable high speed linear data compression.