Patent ID: 8098293

Claim:
An image generating and extracting apparatus comprising: an imaging system for generating original image data of a person and processing the original image data; a face-region identifying means for identifying a face region from the original image data; and a trimming means for automatically trimming the image to remove a range of trimming determined based on the face region identified by the face-region identifying means, the trimming means operating on image data defining the image to eliminate at least a portion of the image data above the face region while maintaining a fixed resolution relative size for the image data defining the face-region, wherein the trimming means operates under the control of a microprocessor, and further wherein the face-region identifying means includes a means for converting input color image data into a coordinate value in a color space and a histogram generator for generating a frequency of appearance for colors in the color space; and further comprising first and second illumination sources, the first and second illumination sources located at opposite sides of a perpendicular line from an imaging device to the person and wherein the illumination sources are respectively positioned such that a line from the person to each illumination source forms an angle of between 30 and 70 degrees with the perpendicular line, and further comprising means for identifying a mouth region, eye region and head top for the image data; and further wherein the apparatus automatically provides an output comprised of image information located at a desired position within an identification card.