Image processing apparatus and image pickup device

Abstract

Information of light from a subject is converted into information of the electric charges to generate image data for one screen in an image pickup device, the image data is outputted to an image processing LSI, only the image data belonging to a plurality of areas is selected by a processing amount reduction unit, the selected image data is transferred to a RAM in a single chop by a data transfer unit, and the processing of recognizing a white line is executed by a CPU on the basis of the image data stored in the RAM.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and more particularly to an image processing apparatus which is suitable for executing the arithmetic operation processing for image data stored in a work memory. [0002] The image processing technology for processing image data obtained by an image pickup device has begun to be adapted to the monitoring system for detecting the invasion of a doubtful person or the abnormality and to the on-board system for supporting the safety travelling of a motorcar. In order to adapt the image processing technology to these systems, the small space and the low cost of an image processing apparatus are required. In order to realize the small space and the low cost, there is required the device of executing the image processing at high speed with the limited arithmetic operation ability of a CPU (Central Processing Unit) and the limited hardware physical superiority. As for the method of miniaturizing...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0028] According to the above-mentioned means, a plurality of image data, an amount of which is less than that of input image data, of the image data used in the arithmetic operation processing is selected before the image data is stored in the image data storage unit, and only the image data thus selected is stored in the image data storage unit. Therefore, it is possible to reduce the storage capacity of the image data storage unit as a local memory (work memory) without employing any of the external memories, which can contribute to the small space and the low cost. In addition, since an amount of image data stored in the image data storage unit is reduced, the load applied to a bus through which the image data is transferred is reduced, and the high speed processing by the arithmetic operation unit (CPU) becomes possible all the more. Furthermore, the processing of writing the image data to the image data storage unit can be suppressed to a minimum.

[0029] In addition, when transferring the image data, the image data in a plurality of areas on the screen or the image data of a plurality of edge parts in which the concentration change in the image is equal to or higher than a predetermined level is transferred, whereby it is possible to reduce an amount of data. Moreover, the image data of a plurality of edge parts, in which the concentration change in the image is equal to or higher than a fixed level, of the image data in a plurality of areas on the screen is transferred together with the coordinate information, whereby it is possible to reduce an amount of data.

Problems solved by technology

At this time, since when the local memory in the single chip has the insufficient capacity, there is no storage unit for storing therein image data, it is impossible to construct the image processing system.

On the other hand, while in the latter of the above-mentioned prior arts, only the data used in the image processing is transferred to execute the processing at high speed, when there is no memory capacity enough to store the data of the original image, it becomes impossible to store the image data in a memory, and hence it is impossible to construct the image processing system.

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