Patent ID: 8153949

Claim:
An article comprising: an encoding/sensing component that includes one or more sensing elements, the encoding/sensing component obtaining sensing results from objects in a respective encoding/sensing region relative to the encoding/sensing component; and a relative motion component that, in operation, causes respective relative motion of each of a subset of the objects; each of the objects in the subset having respective relative motion within the encoding/sensing region; in response to the respective relative motion of an object in the subset within the encoding/sensing region, the sensing results indicating one or more time-varying waveforms; the encoding/sensing component including at least one of: a non-periodic arrangement of sensing elements that, in operation, perform photosensing or impedance-based sensing and obtain sensing results that indicate a non-periodic time-varying waveform with time variation in accordance with the non-periodic arrangement; a longitudinal sequence of sensing elements, the longitudinal sequence having a combined sensing pattern that is approximately equal to a superposition or scaled superposition of a set of two or more simpler sensing patterns so that the sensing elements in the longitudinal sequence, in operation, perform photosensing or impedance-based sensing and obtain sensing results that indicate a superposition time-varying waveform with time variation in accordance with all of the simpler sensing patterns in the set; and one or more IC-implemented sensing elements, each IC-implemented sensing element including: one or more arrays, each on a respective IC; each array including photosensing cells; and readout/combine circuitry that reads out photosensed quantities from a set of the photosensing cells in groups in accordance with one or more cell-group sensing patterns and combines the readout photosensed quantities to obtain sensing results indicating one or more time-varying waveforms with time variation in accordance with the cell-group sensing patterns.