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. 15, 2002
Filed:
Jun. 09, 1998
Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, JP;
Abstract
A digital wide camera is capable of forming, in real time, a wide view still image from a dynamic sequence of images generated during a recording operation by panning the camera to capture a scene. The camera shoots each frame of the sequence with a certain angular field of view at 30 frames per second, for example. The wide view still image has an apparent field of angular view that is greater than that of the image of each frame. The images of the sequence are connected together by determining a shift in position between adjacent images and then overwriting each image to a wide view image buffer after shifting the image by the shift amount. Determining the shift amounts and overwriting the image buffer is accomplished in less time than the interval between shooting consecutive images so that the display of the wide view image can be updated in real time for a user's observation. The amount of shift in position is determined using global pattern matching between adjacent images by taking the projections of the intensity values of the pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions of the images being compared. The projections are subjected to collation processing to identify the amounts in shift in each direction.