Imaging apparatus
AssigneeCanon Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorMie Ishii
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
An imaging apparatus, which includes an imaging device having a plurality of image sensors, is configured to receive light incident on the imaging device, obtain an output voltage based the received light, and generate an image based on the output voltage. The plurality of image sensors have an aperture pixel region that accumulates and outputs the charges generated based on the incident light and a shielded optical black region. The imaging device performs a skipping operation for arbitrarily and non-sequentially selecting a read row. By performing an offset correction of a step amount produced during the non-sequential reading due to the skip operation, the step resulting from the skip reading can be corrected.
Claims30
An imaging apparatus comprising:
- pixel regions which include an aperture pixel region, a first light-shielded pixel region provided on a first side of the aperture pixel region, and a second light-shielded pixel region provided on a second side of the aperture pixel region and corresponding to each row in the aperture pixel region, wherein the second side is different from the first side;
- a reading unit configured to read a signal from the pixel regions for each row;
- a selection unit configured to select a reading row of the pixel regions;
- a correction unit configured to correct for each row a black level of an image signal read from the aperture pixel region using a black level reference signal read from the second light-shielded pixel region of a current read row and a black level reference signal read from the first light-shielded pixel region or the second light-shielded area pixel region of a read row that is before the current read row;
- and
- a control unit configured to control the correction unit to correct the black level of the image signal read from the aperture pixel region using the black level reference signals based on a step amount of a signal level occurring in the signal read from the pixel regions of the non-sequentially read row in a case where a read row of the pixel regions is non-sequentially selected by the selection unit.
An imaging apparatus comprising:
- pixel regions which include an aperture pixel region and a light-shielded pixel region;
- a reading unit configured to read a signal from the pixel regions for each row;
- a selection unit configured to select a reading row of the pixel regions;
- a correction unit configured to correct for each row an image signal read from the aperture pixel region using a reference signal read from the light-shielded pixel region;
- and
- a control unit configured to control the correction unit to correct the image signal read from the aperture pixel region using the reference signal based on a step amount of a signal level occurring in the signal read from the pixel regions of a non-sequentially read row in a case where a read row of the pixel regions is non-sequentially selected by the selection unit.
An imaging apparatus comprising:
- pixel regions which include an effective pixel region and a reference pixel region;
- a reading unit configured to read a signal from the pixel regions for each row;
- a selection unit configured to select a reading row of the pixel regions;
- a correction unit configured to correct for each row the image signal read from the effective pixel region using a reference signal read from the reference pixel region;
- and
- a control unit configured to control the correction unit to correct an image signal read from the effective pixel region using the reference signal based on a step amount of a signal level occurring in the signal read from the pixel regions of a non-sequentially read row in a case where a read row of the pixel regions is non-sequentially selected by the selection unit.
An imaging apparatus comprising:
- pixel regions which include an effective pixel region and a reference pixel region;
- a reading unit configured to read a signal from the pixel regions for each row;
- a correction unit configured to correct for each row an image signal read from the effective pixel region using a reference signal read from the reference pixel region;
- and
- a control unit configured to control the correction unit to correct the image signal using the reference signal based on a step amount of a signal level occurring in the signal read from the pixel regions in a case where the reading unit does not read out the signal from some rows of the pixel regions.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.