Abstract: An exposure control apparatus is provided to perform an adjustment while changing the correction amount of a shutter speed of an image sensor and a gain of a PGA according to the magnitude of an exposure error so that the exposure error falls within an exposure allowable range. The exposure control apparatus changes the correction amount of the shutter speed and the gain at a specified different change rate according to control sensitivity inputted from a microcontroller. If a flicker phenomenon occurs after the exposure error is converged to within the exposure allowable range, the exposure control apparatus sets the control sensitivity to be low. Accordingly, it becomes possible to perform proper exposure control to detect objective information from the captured image.

Abstract: A digital clamping circuit and a digital clamping method are provided which can effectively use the dynamic range of an output signal in black-level correction. When subtracting a black level serving as a reference value from an output signal of an analog front end circuit, a digital clamp circuit permits the production of a negative value, amplifies the dynamic range including the-negative value to increase the dynamic range, adds a predetermined value to the resulting signal, and performs clipping. As a result, the dynamic range of the digital clamp circuit is increased, so that the dynamic range of an output signal can be effectively utilized. Thus, processing that makes good use of a wider dynamic range can be performed in image processing at a subsequent stage, so that image quality can be improved.

Abstract: The invention provides an image processing system which is suitable to carry out image processing in excellent accuracy while removing influence due to characteristics depending on the type difference and which facilitates wide and flexible adaptation over image capturing devices. A digital camera includes an image pick-up sensor unit which receives images as data, a URL memory unit which stores a URL to indicate an acquisition site of image processing data, and a URL adding unit which adds the URL in the URL memory unit to the image data. The printer includes an RAW data read unit which reads out the image data, a URL acquisition unit which acquires the URL added to the image data, an image processing data acquisition unit which acquires the image processing data from the image processing data storage server based on the acquired URL, and an image data processing unit to process the image data based on the acquired image processing data.