Patent ID: 8754941

Claim:
A video camera apparatus with frame-by-frame view switching, the apparatus comprising: a plurality of imagers, each imager comprising a sensor array that is configured to capture a source rectangular image frame and perform a cropping of the source rectangular image frame to obtain a primary rectangular image frame that is in alignment with neighboring primary rectangular image frames; a plurality of image flow processors, each image flow processor being associated with an imager and configured to receive and process the primary rectangular image frames captured by from the sensor array of its associated imager, resize the primary rectangular image frame to a re-sized image frame having a lower number of pixels than the primary rectangular image frame, and perform a horizontal cropping of the re-sized image frame to obtain a horizontally-cropped re-sized image frame; and a multi-imager video processor configured to receive the horizontally-cropped re-sized image frames from the plurality of image flow processors, combine the horizontally-cropped re-sized image frames to obtain a combined image frame, perform a vertical cropping of the combined image frame to obtain a final image frame, and simultaneously provide different views to multiple users through frame-by-frame view switching enabled by sending resizing and horizontal cropping parameters to each image flow processor to control said resizing and horizontal cropping by said image flow processor on a frame-frame basis.