Patent ID: 7355643

Claim:
An image pickup device comprising: an image pickup control unit for specifying a scan area of a frame whose horizontal scanning period and vertical scanning period have been changed based on a scaling factor for electronic zooming; an image sensor for converting light signals accepted thereby into electric signals by performing a reset scanning on each line of the scan area of the frame specified by said image pickup control unit, for accumulating each of the electric signals in a pixel array disposed therein, for reading the electric signals accumulated in said pixel array by performing read scanning on said pixel array and outputting it as image data, and for, in response to an instruction for changing a horizontal scanning period and a vertical scanning period of an Nth frame and later frames in a series of frames from said image pickup control unit, performing reset scanning and read scanning on the Nth frame based on the horizontal scanning period and the vertical scanning period which have been changed even when a reset scanning period of the Nth frame partially overlaps a read scanning period of an (Nâˆ’1)th frame immediately preceding the Nth frame; a register for holding a part of the image data of the frame outputted from said image sensor; an RW control unit for writing the image data about at least the one line of the frame outputted from said image sensor based on the scaling factor for electronic zooming in said register, and for reading the image data about at least the one line of the frame currently being held thereby at a predetermined frame rate; and a resolution converting unit for performing interpolation processing on the image data read by said RW control unit based on the scaling factor for electronic zooming, and for converting the image data into image data having a size of one frame.