Patent ID: 7916172

Claim:
An image pickup apparatus for automatically tracking an object to pick up an image of the object, comprising: a lens apparatus including a zoom lens and a focus lens, the lens apparatus picking up an image of the object; a camera device provided with said lens apparatus for picking up an image of the object acquired by the lens apparatus; a universal head for supporting said camera device and driving pan and tilt of the camera device, a memory for recording pan data, tilt data, zoom data and focus data of said lens apparatus and said universal head, and a size data and a positional data of the image of the object, associated with time information, said pan data, tilt data, zoom data, focus data, size data and positional data being derived from tracking the object and picking up the image of the object; a recognizing circuit for recognizing said object; a shift amount detection unit for detecting a shift amount between the size data and the positional data of the image of the object recorded within the memory, and the size data and the positional data of the image of the object picked up by said camera device; and a control device for controlling said lens apparatus and said camera device and said universal head on the basis of the shift amount detected by said shift amount detection unit and the pan data, tilt data, zoom data and focus data, wherein in a case that said shift amount detection unit detects a positional shift between the positional data of the object recorded within the memory and the positional data of the object picked up by said camera device, said control device controls said universal head to drive the pan and tilt of said camera device so as to reduce the positional shift, and in a case that said shift amount detection unit detects a size shift between the size data of the object recorded within the memory and the size data of the object picked up by said camera device, said control device controls said lens apparatus to perform a zoom adjustment so as to reduce the size shift.