Patent ID: 7969473

Claim:
An image-pickup apparatus comprising: a plurality of image-pickup units including at least first and second image-pickup units each for picking up an image, producing and outputting image data; an image-processing unit for performing a predetermined data process on the image data; and a bus for connecting the first and second image-pickup units to the image-processing unit, wherein the first image-pickup unit has an image-data-ending-pattern-outputting unit for outputting an image-data-ending pattern, which indicates the end of outputting the image data, to the bus, and an image-data-starting-pattern-outputting unit for outputting an image-data-starting pattern, which indicates the start of outputting the image data, to the bus, the second image-pickup unit has an image-data-processing-ending-pattern-detecting unit for detecting the image-data-ending pattern output from the first image-pickup unit so that pick up of the image and output the image data start when the image-data-ending pattern is detected by the image-data-processing-ending-pattern-detecting unit, and the image-processing unit further has an image-data-starting-pattern-detecting unit for detecting the image-data-starting pattern output from the first image-pickup unit, so that the data process starts when the image-data-starting pattern is detected by the image-data-staring-pattern-detecting unit.