Patent ID: 8633977

Claim:
An electronic endoscope apparatus, comprising: a light source for irradiating white light on an observation target body; a color imaging device for imaging the observation target image receiving the white light; a first color conversion circuit for converting Y (luminance)/C (chrominance difference) signals outputted from the color imaging device to RGB three color image signals; a spectroscopic image generation circuit for generating, from the RGB three color image signals, a spectroscopic image within a predetermined wavelength range, said spectroscopic image generation circuit performing a matrix operation using matrix data and the RGB three color image signals to generate the spectroscopic image which is described by spectroscopic three color image signals, and wherein said predetermined wavelength range is selected to visualize an anatomical characteristic of the observation target body, and said predetermined wavelength range is a wavelength range which is narrower than the wavelength range of the observation target image imaged by the color imaging device, and said matrix data comprises matrix parameters which correspond to said predetermined wavelength range; a second color conversion circuit for converting the spectroscopic three color image signals representing the spectroscopic image to Y/C signals; a light amount regulation unit for regulating the amount of white light irradiated on the observation target body from the light source; and a light amount control circuit for controlling the light amount regulation unit based on the luminance information provided by the Y/C signals outputted from the second color conversion circuit to set the brightness of the spectroscopic image described by the spectroscopic three color image signals, within a predetermined brightness range, for visualizing the spectroscopic image.