Patents Examined by Joel Sebastian Shaughnessy
  • Patent number: 6185336
    Abstract: A system and method electronically image process a pixel belonging to a set of digital image data with respect to a membership of the pixel in a plurality of image classes. This process uses fuzzy classification to determine a membership value for the pixel for each image classes and generates an effect tag for the pixel based on the fuzzy classification determination. The pixel is image processed based on the membership vector of the pixel. The determination of the membership value also includes the determination of the halftone frequency of the pixel. The present process injects random noise into the frequency estimate before classification to avoid having a sharp shift in the pixel classification population as the ripple in the frequency microclassifier crosses the quantization threshold.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 23, 1998
    Date of Patent: February 6, 2001
    Assignee: Xerox Corporation
    Inventors: Raymond J. Clark, Stuart A. Schweid
  • Patent number: 6141450
    Abstract: A two-layer image compression device is disclosed with a halftone circuit, an inverse halftone circuit and a quantization circuit. In this circuit, the halftone circuit converts the input gray-scale image into a binary image and rearranges the binary image output sequence to serve as a base layer of the input gray-scale image. The inverse halftone circuit recovers a predicted image from the binary image using the LMS algorithm and multi-table look-up methods. The quantization circuit then compares the input gray-scale image with the predicted image and encodes the difference between them to obtain an enhancement layer of the input gray-scale image.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 10, 1998
    Date of Patent: October 31, 2000
    Assignee: Winbond Electronics Corporation
    Inventors: Li-Ming Chen, Wei-Chih Chang
  • Patent number: 6122406
    Abstract: An image processing device of the present invention includes a photoelectric transducing section for transforming input image information to an electric signal. An analog-to-digital converter converts the electric signal to a digital signal. An image processing section for processing the digital signal has a shading correcting section, a filtering section, a magnification changing section, a gamma correcting section, and a tonality processing section. The filtering section is capable of selecting a particular filter intensity for each of two perpendicular directions in accordance with a desired magnification change ratio. The device is capable of varying an MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) characteristic in the subscanning direction in accordance with a magnification change ratio with simple hardware.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 5, 1998
    Date of Patent: September 19, 2000
    Assignee: Ricoh Company, Ltd.
    Inventor: Hiromi Okubo