Patent ID: 7623174

Claim:
An imaging device, comprising: an imaging section including imaging pixels arranged in a two-dimensional arrangement for photoelectric conversion of incident light; a storage section including image-storing pixels arranged in a two-dimensional arrangement, each image-storing pixel corresponding to one of the imaging pixels; a transfer section for transferring a charge occurring in each of the imaging pixels to a corresponding one of the image-storing pixels as a signal; and an output section for reading out the signal from each of the image-storing pixels, wherein: the output section includes: a progressive scanning shift register for producing a read-out pulse to be supplied to a first region being a row-wide portion of the storage section; and a skip scanning shift register for producing a read-out pulse to be supplied to intermittently-selected rows in a second region including an entire region other than the first region, wherein the output section is configured so that for the first region, a read-out pulse produced by the progressive scanning shift register is used to perform a progressive read-out operation of reading out signals from all rows of image-storing pixels, and for the second region, a read-out pulse produced by the skip scanning shift register is used to perform a skip read-out operation of reading out signals from intermittently-selected rows of image-storing pixels, and pixel signals of the first region and pixel signals of the second region are read out in combination; and the progressive scanning shift register produces the read-out pulse so that the first region continuously moves every frame and the first region scans an entire region of the storage section over a plurality of frames.