Abstract: A distance measurement apparatus includes comprising: an image capturing section for capturing an image of an object to be imaged, for which information is known regarding an image capturing position, an angle of image capturing direction and an image capturing area; a reference image storage section for receiving the image from the image capturing section and storing an image information of the image as a reference image; and a distance data computation section for determining a distance data L, the distance data L indicating a distance between the object to be imaged and the image capturing position, the determination being based on a lowermost position information of the object to be imaged in an image frame, the lowermost position information being based on a difference value between the image information of the reference image stored in the reference image storage section and an image information of an image newly captured by the image capturing section.

Abstract: The present invention provides a method of processing an unknown physical fingerprint for use in a data processing system to verify/identify an unknown fingerprint. The method involves obtaining an unknown fingerprint image that includes images of ridges, binarizing the images of ridges in the unknown fingerprint image, generating an image with fused ridges by expanding the images of ridges in the binarized image, shrinking the image with fused ridges to create a scaled-down image, and masking a first portion of the unknown fingerprint image with the scaled-down image so as to create a modified image of the unknown fingerprint.

Abstract: By an image processing method, a contour of a figure is represented with a series of clockwise outline vectors, a sense of each vector being set such that the figure be painted out by painting a left side of the vector, then, an outline is created from the outline vectors, and the figure is painted through a scanning operation in an x-axis direction by starting a painting operation at an odd-numbered intersection of the outline and a horizontal scanning line and suspending the painting operation at an even-numbered intersection thereof, thus painting pixels between the odd-numbered intersection and the even-numbered intersection, inclusive of the pixel at the odd-numbered intersection but exclusive of the pixel at the even-numbered intersection. In order to create the outline, plotting points for the outline are first calculating from the outline vectors through use of Bresenham algorithm. Then, a positional relation of a current plotting point to the previous one and the next one is obtained.