Abstract: An imaging system includes a camera for capturing image frames, a frame pre-screen unit for pre-screening the captured image frames, a frame store unit for storing the pre-screened frames, and a refined frame mosaicing unit for generating a refined mosaic from the pre-screened image frames that are stored in the frame store unit. The frame pre-screen unit may include a coarse align unit for generating a coarse image mosaic from the pre-screened image frames, and a display for displaying the coarse image mosaic. In an embodiment, the coarse image mosaic is generated and displayed in real-time relative to the image frames that are captured by the camera. In an embodiment of the imaging system, the display is located within the camera and in another embodiment, the frame pre-screen unit and the frame store unit are located within the camera.

Abstract: The present invention is a fully JPEG compliant two-pass approach that can compress an arbitrary image to a predetermined fixed size file. The compression coding device and method according to the present invention estimates an activity metric based on the average sum of the absolute value of the quantized DCT coefficients per block. Given the activity metric, a mathematical model relating the image activity to the JPEG Q-factor for a given value of the target compression ratio provides an estimated Q-factor value that yields the design target ratio. This mathematical model is developed during a calibration phase which is executed once off line for a given image capturing device. The fact that our activity metric is based on the quantized DCT coefficients allows for an efficient implementation of the presented coding method in either speed or memory bound systems.

Abstract: A method of transforming a multi-beam ultrasonic image in which a plurality of ultrasonic beams are simultaneously transmitted into an object along a plurality of lines and across a plurality of arcs. The reflected signals are sensed along each line and sampled thereby creating an image matrix of sampled values taken from the intersection of each line and arc. For each image value, a linear combination of surrounding values is formed to create a transformed image value which reduces the effect of interbeam interference.