Patent ID: 7399953

Claim:
An optical pointing device, comprising: a light source driver configured to provide a pulsed drive current; a light source operably connected to the light source driver and configured to respond to the pulsed drive current by providing a sequence of light pulses to illuminate an imaging surface and thereby generate a corresponding sequence of images reflected from the imaging surface; a photodetector array configured to sense the image sequence as a corresponding sequence of analog signal arrays; an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter operably connected to the photodetector array and configured to convert the analog signal array sequence into a corresponding arrays of digital values; a navigation processor operably connected to the A/D converter and the light source driver, the processor being configured to store, in a memory, individual frames corresponding to the digital values and the sequence of images corresponding thereto, each frame comprising an array of pixel values, the navigation processor further being configured to process each frame at a frame rate and determine an image quality value corresponding to each frame based on at least one of a measured average pixel value of the frame, a measured minimum pixel value of the frame, a measured pixel ratio value of the frame, and a measured maximum pixel value of the frame, the navigation processor further being configured to control a duty cycle of the light source driver and at least one of a pulse amplitude and a pulse width of the pulsed drive current thereof on the basis of the image quality value determined for each frame, the duty cycle being synchronized with the frame rate.