Patent ID: 7538794

Claim:
A method for estimating motion within a digital image captured by a digital imaging device, comprising: during a single exposure cycle for capturing a single image frame: exposing a particular field of a CCD sensor array for a short period to produce short-exposure image data, the CCD sensor array having at least one field and an optically shielded shift register that is capable of holding an entire field; exposing the particular field for a long period to produce long-exposure image data, the long period being a predetermined factor times the short period, where the short period and the long period are within the single exposure cycle; transferring to the optically shielded shift register whichever of the short-exposure data and the long-exposure data are produced first; exposing any other fields of the CCD sensor array other than the particular field throughout the short and long periods, the digital image being comprised of image data from at least one field; and correlating the short-exposure image data and the long-exposure image data to derive an estimate of motion within the digital image.