Patent ID: 8730313

Claim:
An endoscope apparatus comprising: an imaging unit which continuously captures a subject image formed by an optical system to create a video signal of a site of observation; a creating unit which creates a measurement-possible flag indicating whether or not measurement is possible for every frame of image data of the video signal, the measurement-possible flag being created based on information on a state of the endoscope apparatus including all of: (i) a type of the optical system, (ii) whether or not an image process which influences measurement accuracy is being performed, and (iii) a format of the image data; a recording unit which records video data and control data on a recording medium, wherein the video data comprises the frames of image data, and wherein the control data includes the measurement-possible flag for each of the frames of image data and is used to control a measurement operation; a reading unit which reads the video data and the control data from the recording medium; and a measuring unit which determines whether or not the measurement operation is possible based on the measurement-possible flag included in the control data read by the reading unit, and when it is determined that the measurement operation is possible, performs the measurement operation based on the image data of the video data read by the reading unit, wherein the measurement operation is a three-dimensional measurement operation.