Vehicle driving information storage apparatus and vehicle driving information storage method

A vehicle driving information storage method for storing an image of a driver's state and a vehicle state, said method comprising:

• simultaneously capturing an image of a driver's state, a state inside a vehicle, and a state outside a vehicle with a wide angle lens;
• outputting a digital signal of an image captured by said wide angle lens from a signal output;
• storing and updating an image storage with the digital signal output from said signal output at a predetermined frequency;
• detecting a change of a driving condition of said vehicle by a condition change detector;
• inhibiting an update of images by a necessary image data preserver after detection of a driving condition change by said condition change detector;
• dividing the image into a necessary region and an unnecessary region according to an importance of image information in the image, so that the unnecessary region of the image is discarded and the necessary region is stored together with position information of the region in a data storage and dividing the remaining image into a plurality of regions according to the image information importance in the image;
• setting different compression ratios for said regions such that a region of a lower importance has a higher compression ratio than a region of a higher importance;
• and
• generating compressed data for each of said regions and storing the compressed data in the data storage;
• and
• wherein when reproducing the image, separately decompressing the compressed data of the necessary region stored in the data storage and relocating the decompressed data according to the position information.

A vehicle driving information storage method for storing an image of a driver's state and a vehicle state, said method comprising:

• simultaneously capturing an image of a driver's state, a state inside a vehicle, and a state outside a vehicle with a wide angle lens;
• outputting a digital signal of an image captured by said wide angle lens from a signal output;
• storing and updating an image storage with the digital signal output from said signal output at a predetermined frequency;
• detecting a change of a driving condition of said vehicle by a condition change detector;
• inhibiting an update of images by a necessary image data preserver after detection of a driving condition change by said condition change detector;
• dividing the image into a necessary region and an unnecessary region according to an importance of the image information in the image and discarding the image of the unnecessary region;
• dividing the necessary region into a plurality of regions according to the importance of the image information in the necessary region;
• setting different compression ratios for the respective regions such that a region of a lower importance has a higher compression ratio than a region of a higher importance, and generating compressed data for each of the regions of the necessary region to be stored together with position information of the respective regions in a data storage;
• and
• reproducing the image by separately decompressing the compressed data of the respective regions of the necessary region and relocating the decompressed data according to the respective position information of the corresponding regions.

A vehicle driving information storage method for storing an image of a driver's state and a vehicle state, said method comprising:

• simultaneously capturing an image of a driver's state, a state inside a vehicle, and a state outside a vehicle with a wide angle lens;
• outputting a digital signal of an image captured by said wide angle lens from a signal output;
• storing and updating an image storage with the digital signal output from said signal output at a predetermined frequency;
• detecting a change of a driving condition of said vehicle by a condition change detector;
• inhibiting an update of images by a necessary image data preserver after detection of a driving condition change by said condition change detector;
• dividing the image into a plurality of types of regions according to the image information importance in the image;
• setting different compression ratios for said types of regions in such a manner that a region of a lower importance has a higher compression ratio than a region of a higher importance;
• and
• generating compressed data for each of said regions and storing the compressed data in a data storage medium,
• wherein each of the regions is divided into small rectangular areas, so that a sequential coding is applied to the respective regions to generate a compressed data for each of the regions, the regions being stored in a data storage medium together with position information of the respective small rectangular areas as the position information of the respective regions.