Patent ID: 8022994

Claim:
A method of achieving a high dynamic range in an image sensor having photo-sensitive pixels arranged in a row and column format supporting line-by-line read out of rows, comprising: in a normal resolution mode: assigning each pixel a same exposure time using a first pre-charge address block which occupies a first area of the image sensor, and reading out rows in a line-by-line sequence; and in a down-sampling mode: using a second pre-charge address block which occupies a second area of the image sensor, assigning each row a row exposure time in which all of the pixels within a particular row have a common exposure time and selecting an alternating sequence of row exposure times along a vertical dimension such that pixels along a vertical dimension that are of a compatible type for combining during down-sampling have at least two different row exposure times, wherein the second pre-charge address block is different from the first pre-charge address block, reading out rows in a line-by-line sequence, and combining data from sets of rows with different row exposure times in order to simultaneously reduce the vertical resolution and also extend the dynamic range.