Patent ID: 7050099
Filing Date: 2006-05-23
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
1. A solid-state image pickup apparatus, comprising: a solid-state image pickup device including a photoelectric conversion section divided into a plurality of blocks, and readout amplifiers for the respective blocks; and a level correction circuit for correcting gray level variations in outputs from the plurality of readout amplifiers, wherein the level correction circuit includes: a boundary pixel memory for storing, separately for each block, gray level data of at least one row of pixels in each block that are adjacent to a block boundary in the photoelectric conversion, among the outputs from the plurality of readout amplifiers; a cumulative histogram production circuit for producing, separately for each block in the photoelectric conversion section, a cumulative histogram regarding the number of pixels for different gray levels, by using the gray level data stored in the boundary pixel memory; a non-linear correction data table production circuit for producing a data table representing a correspondence between each gray level before correction and that after correction for a block to be corrected among the plurality of blocks in the photoelectric conversion section so as to reduce a difference between the cumulative histograms for the respective blocks, which are produced by the cumulative histogram production circuit; a correction data RAM for storing the produced data table; and a gray level correction circuit for performing a non-linear correction, for different gray levels, on the output for the block to be corrected among the outputs from the plurality of readout amplifiers, by using the data table stored in the correction data RAM.