Patent ID: 7746391

Claim:
A resolution proportional digital zoom system, comprising: a digital camera with an image and an output for a video frame with a frame-rate “f”; characterized by: a video communications uplink for connection to a remote user control site, and having a limited bandwidth “BW”; a front end control for reading out every imager pixel, or less than every imager pixel from said imager; a device to pass through every imager pixel to a back-end computation where a virtual display pixel can be computed from an average of at least two imager pixels; a field-of-view (FOV) cropping controller for selecting a video subframe with a resolution of m*n pixels from said video frame for zoom control in response to a user command; and a resolution controller for sampling pixels within said video subframe such that samples “S” times m*n times “f” is less than or equal to the bandwidth “BW”, S(m+n)*F≦BW; wherein, the image resolution of video frames ultimately delivered to a user is manageable with either the front end control or said back-end computation.