IMAGE SENSOR WITH CROPPING

摘要

An image sensor (102) which can output only desired portions of an image. Thus, the image is essentially cropped at the time it is produced, eliminating the generation of data from the image sensor (102) corresponding to undesired portions of the data. This reduces the storage requirements for data being digitally processed, reducing or eliminating the need for a frame buffer memory. In a preferred embodiment, a single silicon chip (100) including a CCD array (102) includes a number of registers (112) which can be programmed for each frame to indicate which lines should be read out. Within each line, the chip (100) can be controlled by timing pulses to quickly read out data before or after the desired cropped portion of the image, with the quickly read data simply being discarded. The actual data desired can then be read out at a slower clock rate to allow processing on the fly.