Patent ID: 7680192

Claim:
A multi-sensor network camera comprising: a plurality of image sensors, wherein focal planes of said image sensors are positioned at an angle to each other; a plurality of image pre-processors each electrically coupled to a respective one of the plurality of sensors, wherein a number of images pre-processors is the same as a number of sensors, wherein each image pre-processor comprises a plurality of first pipelined hardware stages each including a Bayer interpolation hardware module, a color correction matrix transform hardware module, a white balancing color measurement hardware module, an automatic exposure luminance measurement hardware module and a plurality of hardware buffers, wherein flow of video stream pixels is operated on sequentially by said first pipeline hardware stages; a multiplexor and decimation module for decimating high resolution video streams of a scene from the image sensors to generate low resolution video streams of said scene, and multiplexing said high resolution and said decimated low resolution video streams of said scene; an image post-processor comprising a plurality of second pipelined hardware stages including a compression hardware module for compressing the high resolution video streams generated by the image sensors and the low resolution video streams from the multiplexor and decimation module, wherein flow of multiplexed video stream pixels is operated on sequentially by said second pipeline hardware stages; a microprocessor coupled to the plurality of sensors, the plurality of image pre-processors and the image post-processor, wherein said microprocessor is configured to control the operation of the pipeline hardware stages, and to perform white balancing and auto exposure using data from said white balancing color measurement hardware module and said automatic exposure luminance measurement hardware module; and a network interface for transmitting said compressed high resolution and said compressed low resolution video streams compressed by said compression hardware module via a computer network.