Patent ID: 7195588

Claim:
An endoscope image pick-up apparatus comprising: an image pick-up unit for insertion into the body for capturing an image; an extra-corporeal unit arranged outside the body, the extra-corporeal unit receiving the image captured by the image pick-up unit by radio; a data transmitting device provided in the image pick-up unit for transmitting the image obtained by the image pick-up device to the extra-corporeal unit at a plurality of transmitting ratios; a characteristic amount detecting device provided in the image pick-up unit for detecting a first amount of characteristics and a second amount of characteristics different from the first amount of characteristics from the image obtained by the image pick-up unit, the first amount of characteristics detected by the characteristic amount detecting device being a number of pixels having a specific color; and a determining device provided in the image pick-up unit for determining a validity of the image according to the characteristic amount detected by the characteristic amount detecting device, the determining device having a first determining device for determining the validity of the image based on the number of pixels having a specific color detected as the first amount of characteristics, and a second determining device for determining the validity of the image based on the second amount of characteristics, the second amount of characteristics being selected from optical characteristics other than color-specific characteristics, the data transmitting device controls the data transmitting ratio in accordance with the determining result of the determining device.