The present invention is directed to a
system and method for reducing the memory requirement for offset and
gain calibration to relieve the size / performance
bottleneck in
scanner systems. The resulting methodology produces visually equivalent scanned results with a substantial increase in performance, which results in a shorter amount of time required to output a first copy in, for example, an all-in-one device. Since the calibration step is often the
bottleneck in
scanner performance, this method noticeably speeds up scan and copy time. Implementing the decompression in hardware requires a minimal amount of hardware overhead and complexity. Thus, this method has a minimal
impact on the size and cost of the
scanner controller (e.g., an ASIC—
application specific integrated circuit). Since compression only takes place at most once per scan, this added step has no significant
impact on the overall
scan time. By allowing dynamic grouping of pixels using a single calibration packet, the quality of the compensation can be optimized with the size of the compensation data being minimized. Adding the ability to shift the compressed deviation stored in the calibration packet, the range of the pixel-to-pixel deviation can be increased without impacting the size of the calibration data. This flexibility makes this invention applicable to future image sensors that may have widely varying deviations in pixel-to-pixel offset and
gain values.