Vertical compensation in a moving camera
First Claim
1. A device comprising:
- (a) a housing shaped and dimensioned to allow the device to be hand held;
(b) a display secured to the housing for displaying moving pictures on a frame-by-frame basis;
(c) a camera arranged in the housing so as to define an optical axis extending away from the housing in a direction from which the display is viewable, thereby to image an object positioned to view the display, the camera including a detector comprising an array of light sensitive elements for obtaining respective pixels of an image frame;
(d) a sensor operable to make measurements of a physical parameter from which a rotational angle between an alignment axis of the hand-held device and a reference alignment axis in real space can be determined; and
(e) a signal processing circuit arranged to associate image frames taken by the camera with respective rotational angles determined from the sensor measurements.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A hand-held device comprising a housing (10) shaped and dimensioned to allow the device to be hand held, a display (12) secured to the housing for displaying moving pictures on a frame-by-frame basis, and a camera (16, 18) having an optical axis (O) extending generally away from the display to image a person who is viewing the display. The hand-held device further comprises a sensor (20) configured to determine a rotational angle between an alignment axis (V) of the hand-held device and a reference alignment axis in real space. Alternative embodiments use a reference alignment axis obtained on the basis of data content of the images, as determined by image processing techniques. In this way, subjective picture quality can be improved by compensating for vertical mis-alignment of the image content of the frames obtained by the camera.
28 Citations
17 Claims
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1. A device comprising:
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(a) a housing shaped and dimensioned to allow the device to be hand held;
(b) a display secured to the housing for displaying moving pictures on a frame-by-frame basis;
(c) a camera arranged in the housing so as to define an optical axis extending away from the housing in a direction from which the display is viewable, thereby to image an object positioned to view the display, the camera including a detector comprising an array of light sensitive elements for obtaining respective pixels of an image frame;
(d) a sensor operable to make measurements of a physical parameter from which a rotational angle between an alignment axis of the hand-held device and a reference alignment axis in real space can be determined; and
(e) a signal processing circuit arranged to associate image frames taken by the camera with respective rotational angles determined from the sensor measurements. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
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16. An image processing method, comprising:
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receiving a sequence of image frames taken by a camera;
determining a vertical alignment axis for each frame of the sequence;
applying a rotational transform to each frame through an angle determined from mis-alignment between a vertical alignment axis related to image content and a fixed alignment axis of the frame; and
outputting the sequence of image frames thus transformed to compensate for vertical misalignment of the image content of the frames. - View Dependent Claims (17)
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Specification