Television – Camera – system and detail – Combined image signal generator and general image signal...
Reexamination Certificate
1998-08-04
2002-03-26
Harvey, David E. (Department: 2614)
Television
Camera, system and detail
Combined image signal generator and general image signal...
C348S578000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06362850
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to digital imaging devices, and more particularly to a method and system for interactively creating a movie from one or more images in such a device.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The use of digital video cameras and digital still cameras is becoming widespread. Digital video cameras differ from digital still cameras in a number of respects. Digital video cameras capture approximately thirty frames per second and are optimized to capture a large amount of moving images, but sacrifice image quality. That is, digital video cameras typically capture thirty low-resolution 640×480 images per second. However, the uncompressed digital video signals from all those low resolution images require huge amounts memory storage, and high-ratio real-time compression schemes, such as MPEG, are essential for providing digital video for today's computers. Unfortunately, the hardware to support such processing is expensive, placing most digital video cameras outside the reach of most consumers.
Still digital cameras offer a less expensive alternative to digital video cameras, but are used primarily for capturing high quality static photographs. Still digital cameras are less expensive because they have far less processing power and memory capacity than digital video cameras. Even with these limitations, some still digital cameras are also capable of capturing sequential images, such as a burst image. A burst image is a series of images captured in rapid succession, such as 3 images per second, for instance.
A typical still digital camera equipped with an LCD screen operates in two modes, capture or record mode for capturing images, and play mode for playing back the captured images on the LCD screen. Unfortunately, even still digital cameras capable of capturing burst images are incapable of displaying the images comprising the burst in play mode as a movie. One reason it is that a burst image usually includes only 3-8 images and therefore does not have a sufficient number of images to display as a movie. And even if there were enough images to play as a movie, the camera would be incapable of displaying the images at the high frame rate required for a movie presentation. This is because the camera would have to retrieve each image from memory, decompress, resize and then display each image. Due to the limited resources of today's still digital cameras, the display of a burst image resembles more of a slide show than a movie.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for interactively creating a movie from one or more still images in a digital camera. The present invention addresses such a need.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides a method and system for interactively creating a movie from a still image in a digital imaging device that includes a display screen. The method and system include determining a path of panning across the still image, generating a plurality of image frames along the path of panning, and then displaying the plurality image frames for a predetermined time interval on the display screen to present the movie.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the path of panning is determined by the user placing several key frames on the still images. By varying the sizes of the key frames, the user may also control the amount of zoom between the key frames. After the key frames are defined, the camera automatically interpolates a series of image frames between each pair of key frames to provide a sufficient number of frames to play during the duration of the movie. In another aspect of the present invention, a movie is created from a group of images by cross fading the movies as a function of time. The resulting movie appears much smoother than it would otherwise because abrupt scene changes between each of the images in the groups are minimized by the cross fading transitions between the group of images. According to the present invention, high-frame rate movie presentations are created from a low frame-rate still digital camera having limited storing capacity.
REFERENCES:
patent: 4694345 (1987-09-01), Rodgers
patent: 4750888 (1988-06-01), Allard et al.
patent: 2160748 (1985-12-01), None
patent: 5-207502 (1993-08-01), None
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patent: 34195 (1998-08-01), None
Alsing Carl J.
Anderson Eric C.
FlashPoint Technology Inc.
Harvey David E.
Sawyer Law Group LLP
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