Patent ID: 7002631

Claim:
An image pickup apparatus, comprising: a solid-state image pickup element including a plurality of image parts forming a pixel array, a plurality of charge transfer gates, wherein each of said image parts is coupled with a charge transfer gate, and wherein each charge transfer gate can be controlled to transfer a charge from a coupled image part to a transmission path, and a charge transfer gate electrode split into a plurality of phases, wherein each of said plurality of charge transfer gates is associated with one of the plurality of phases thereby defining a plurality of sets of charge transfer gates, and wherein a drive signal via a charge transfer gate electrode of a given phase controls the corresponding set of associated charge transfer gates to transfer charges from a set of image parts to the transmission path; driving means for supplying a plurality of pulses, each of said pulses for driving a different set of charge transfer gates corresponding to one of said plurality of phases; exposure control means that ends exposure by control signalling resulting in the output by said driving means of said plurality of pulses driving said different sets of charge transfer gates, wherein, for a given image part, exposure ends with its corresponding charge transfer gate acting on a received corresponding driving pulse, said plurality of pulses driving said different sets of charge transfer gates resulting in different exposure times for at least some different sets of image parts for the same exposure setting; means of reading output signals that reads signals output by said solid-state image pickup element; and signal compensation means that conditionally implements adding, to output signals read by said means of reading output signals, prescribed amounts of signal compensation, wherein each of said prescribed amounts of signal compensation is determined using the exposure time of the image part or parts from which the output signal is derived, and wherein said plurality of pulses are output with prescribed time differences.