Patent ID: 8675096

Claim:
An imaging device comprising: an imaging mechanism; a sound acquisition unit operable to acquire sound data that includes information reflecting an imaging environment; a setting unit operable to, based on the sound data acquired by the sound acquisition unit, select and set one or more setting values for controlling the imaging mechanism; and a scene designation unit that (i) includes an extraction subunit operable to extract, from the sound data acquired by the sound acquisition unit, an environmental sound feature amount indicating the imaging environment, (ii) stores therein model information pieces that each defines various types of sound features, each of the types of sound features having a predetermined relationship with a corresponding one of imaging scenes, and (iii) is operable to designate one of the imaging scenes, with reference to the model information pieces and based on the environmental sound feature amount extracted by the extraction subunit, wherein each feature amount is a vector quantity composed of, as components, one or more of attributes of sound that are represented by a power of sound, zero crossing, a spectrum-related feature amount, a cepstrum-related feature amount, and a chroma vector, each model information piece includes information showing at least one value for each component of a vector quantity and is to be compared with each feature amount, the scene designation unit designates the imaging scene based on likelihoods that respectively pertain to pairs of a model information piece and a feature amount, each likelihood indicating a matching degree between the vector quantity indicated by the corresponding model information piece and the vector quantity of the corresponding feature amount, and the setting unit (i) stores therein correspondence information that associates each of the imaging scenes with one or more setting values, and (ii) selects and sets one or more setting values associated by the correspondence information with the imaging scene designated by the scene designation unit as the one or more setting values for controlling the imaging mechanism.