Patent ID: 7978245

Claim:
A method for controlling color balance in a digital image captured by a digital imaging device, comprising: acquiring a pre-exposure frame; analyzing the pre-exposure frame to determine a respective exposure time for each of a set of color components, the respective exposure time of each color component being inversely related to its strength relative to the other color components; resetting a row-addressable area-array sensor to initiate the exposure times, the row-addressable area-array sensor being arranged in rows and having a set of pixels for each color component; and reading out the pixels of each color component sequentially after the corresponding exposure time has elapsed; wherein the reading out of the pixels comprises, for each of multiple of the rows of the row-addressable area-array sensor, for each of the color components contained in the row, non-destructively reading the pixels of the color component in the row at a respective time after the row was last reset corresponding to the respective exposure time of the color component.