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US 5,847,718 AGranted
Image processing system for displaying of large images in an efficient manner
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorDavid Watson
Life of this patent
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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorDavid Watson
Estimating the term…
An image processing system is connected to a display device for displaying an image comprising a plurality of frames. The system comprises first and second processors, input controller for receiving positional information from a user via an input device connectable to the image processing system, and a shared memory accessible by the first and second processors for storing data representing frames of an image, and the positional information. The first processor is arranged to load frames of the image from a storage device in to the shared memory, for each frame the first processor being arranged to retrieve from the storage device data representing that frame, to load the frame data into the shared memory, and to store in the shared memory frame address information identifying the location within shared memory of the frame data and the positional relationship of the frame to other frames of the image. Further, the first processor accesses the positional information to determine in what order to load the frames of the image in to shared memory. In parallel, the second processor is arranged to access the positional information to determine a portion of the image to be displayed, and with reference to the frame address information, to retrieve the corresponding image data from the shared memory for display of that portion on the display device. By this approach, the system enables image data to be loaded and displayed to a user in a manner which meets the performance requirements of the user, but which does not require the use of complex and expensive hardware as employed in prior art systems.
An image processing system connectable to a display device for displaying an image comprising a plurality of frames, the system comprising:
A method of operating an image processing system to display an image comprising a plurality of frames, the image processing system having first and second processors, and a shared memory accessible by the first and second processors for storing data representing frames of the image, the method comprising the steps of:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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No related US applications are recorded in the indexed filing history.
General purpose image data processing: memory management
Studio circuitry; Studio devices; Studio equipment: studio circuits, e.g. for mixing, switching-over, change of character of image, other special…
Image data processing or generation, in general
Pictorial communication
Term ended 2 Dec 2016 (estimated)
USPTO file history isn’t available for this patent, so only indexed dates are shown.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the subject of image processing, and in particular to the displaying of large images in an efficient manner.
2. Related Art
The present invention will be described further, by way of example only, with reference to a preferred embodiment thereof as illustrated in the accompanying drawings, in which:
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an image processing system in accordance with the preferred embodiment of the present invention;
FIG. 2 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation of the system shown in FIG. 1; and
For the purposes of the preferred embodiment, we shall assume that an image of interest is stored as a group of image frames in a disc storage system accessible by the image processing system. Clearly any appropriate storage system can be used, and indeed the access to the storage system may be achieved in any suitable manner, eg local access, access via LAN, WAN, etc.
Typically the image may extend over a large area, and in such cases the frames may be thought of as tiles which, when placed in appropriate positions with respect to each other, will reproduce the complete image. Alternatively, the image may be a long narrow strip such as that produced by passing a camera in a straight line over an object of interest. In such cases, the image frames need to be positioned sequentially one after the other in order to reproduce the original image.
In order to present the frames of the image on a display device, they must first be loaded into a memory area and then displayed by hardware to a display device (for example a computer screen, projection display etc.). However, as already mentioned earlier, when the image is large, and there are hence many frames to be loaded, the internal memory of the system will generally not be large enough to retain image data for all of the frames making up the image. In such cases, frames need to be loaded whilst the user is viewing other portions of the image. It is often the case that, unless specialist hardware is employed, data cannot be loaded quickly enough to ensure that the portion of the image the user desires to view is always available for viewing at the time the user requests it.