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:
May. 03, 2016
Filed:
Feb. 17, 2011
Yonghwan Eom, Seoul, KR;
Hoyoun Lee, Seoul, KR;
Youngjin Kim, Seoul, KR;
LG ELECTRONICS INC., Seoul, KR;
Abstract
A refrigerator includes a compressor, a condenser, an expansion unit, an evaporator for evaporating a refrigerant that has passed through the expansion unit, a heating unit for providing heat for defrosting the evaporator, a photographing device provided at one side of the evaporator and disposed to photograph the evaporator, so as to sense the amount of frost on the evaporator, the photographing device including a photographing unit for photographing frost on the evaporator and the surrounding background, and a control unit configured to determine the amount of frost on the evaporator from an image taken by the photographing device by acquiring pixel values which are proportionate to the amount of frost on the evaporator by applying image processing which includes binarization that separates the frost from other acquired images to determine the amount of frost on the evaporator, the control unit further configured to control the heating unit to operate when the amount of frost exceeds a predetermined amount.