Granted Patent B2

US 8,630,511 · App. 11/520,778 · Granted Jan 14, 2014

Abstract

Claims (27)

1. An image processing apparatus, comprising:

a data supply node to receive line data scanned in a main scan direction of an image;

an image enlargement unit coupled to the data supply node to apply to the line data an enlargement process for enlarging the image by an enlargement factor equal to an integer so as to produce enlarged data at an output node;

an image reduction unit coupled to the output node of the image enlargement unit to apply to the enlarged data a reduction process for reducing the enlarged image by a desired reduction factor so as to produce reduced data at an output node;

an image sensor to output image data to an output node;

an image cutout unit coupled between the output node of the image sensor and the data supply node to supply, as the line data to the data supply node, data corresponding to a portion cut out of the image data; and

a system bus coupled to the output node of the image reduction unit; and a frame memory coupled to the system bus to store the reduced data,

wherein the image enlargement unit is coupled to the output node of the image cutout unit without having an intervening frame memory,

and wherein scan-line data scanned in the main scan direction is output from the image sensor at a given speed, and the scan-line data is input into and output from the image cutout unit, the image enlargement unit, and the image reduction unit at the same speed as the given speed.

2. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the enlargement factor of the enlargement process performed by the image enlargement unit is at least one fixed magnification factor, and the reduction factor of the reduction process performed by the image reduction unit is a freely settable magnification factor.

3. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the enlargement process performed by the image enlargement unit is enlargement based on nearest neighbor interpolation, and wherein the image reduction unit includes a filtering unit configured to apply low-pass filtering to the enlarged data.

4. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 3 , wherein the reduction process performed by the image reduction unit is reduction based on bilinear interpolation or bicubic interpolation.

5. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the image reduction unit is coupled to the output node of the image enlargement unit without having an intervening frame memory.

6. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 1 , further comprising a horizontal reduction unit configured to receive image data as an input and to supply, as the line data to the data supply node, data obtained by applying a horizontal reduction process for reducing the image data in a horizontal direction.

7. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 6 , wherein the image enlargement unit is configured to enlarge the image by copying each pixel value by use of a nearest neighbor method.

8. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 6 , wherein the horizontal reduction unit is configured to perform the horizontal reduction process through sub-sampling that takes an average of a plurality of pixels of the image data.

9. The image processing apparatus as claimed in claim 8 , wherein the horizontal reduction unit is configured to compute the average by use of an adder and a bit-shift circuit.

10. An image processing method for use in an image processing apparatus including an image sensor, a system bus, and a memory, comprising:

outputting image data of an original image from the image sensor at predetermined data speed;

cutting out a portion of the original image as a partial image;

receiving line data of the partial image scanned in a main scan direction of the partial image;

applying to the line data an enlargement process for enlarging the partial image by an enlargement factor equal to an integer so as to produce enlarged data; and

applying to the enlarged data a reduction process for reducing the enlarged image by a desired reduction factor so as to produce reduced data;

storing the reduced data in the memory through the system bus,

wherein the above are performed as a series of processes that match the data speed, and

wherein the enlargement process is performed on the line data of the partial image without using an intervening frame memory for storing the line data of the partial image,

and wherein scan-line data scanned in the main scan direction is output from the image sensor at a given speed, and the scan-line data is input and output during the cutting out of a portion of the original image, the enlargement process, and the reduction process at the same speed as the given speed.

Assignments (10)