Photographic scanner with integrated charge-coupled device

A scanner with an integrated 2048-element-per-line color charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor has been developed for scanning 4" x 6" photographs at up to 500 dots/in resolution. Integration of the three sensors with color filters on a single chip greatly simplifies the scanner system design. The scanner system includes light-source optics mechanical drive CCD drive electronics digital signal processing (DSP) electronics and controlling hardware/firmware. A novel selfcalibration scheme provides brightness and uniformity correction to the scanned image data in real time. Also in real time DSP circuits perform sharpening and color processing allowing for fast high quality scans of photographic images. Prints of up to 4" x 6" are scanned at 500 dots/in resolution and 24-bit color in less than 10 seconds. Application areas include graphic arts technical and scientific imaging insurance and real estate. 1.