Patent ID: 8452056

Claim:
An image-processing camera for a vehicle, comprising: an image pickup device mounted on the vehicle, said image pickup device having a lens, an image pickup element, and an optical system controller that controls said lens and said image pickup element; a memory storage that stores at least two of the following three applications: i) an automatic light control application, ii) a lane deviation alarm application, and iii) a vehicle alarm application, which perform image processing for running of the vehicle using an image acquired by said image pickup device based on one or more different camera parameters; a controller that: acquires the image used by any two of the automatic light control application, the lane deviation alarm application, and the vehicle alarm application from said image pickup device used in common, has a schedule for acquiring repeatedly image data used by the two of the three applications in a state which does not overlap in time based on each rate set up for every application, and executing said two of the three applications as a function of time, and sets up the optical system controller based on predetermined camera parameters, according to said schedule; wherein setup of the optical system controller and acquisition of the image data from the image pickup element are performed repeatedly based on the schedule of the image data acquisition, as a function of time, and processing of the two of the three applications is performed using the acquired image data.