[pbradley]

Originally Posted by Hip Priest

I accidentally mistyped a search and was intrigued by a link to a "Characteristic Extracting Apparatus". It turns out that there is a US patent for such a thing, and it is described thusly:

A window signal generating device for use in a video scanning apparatus, for producing a window signal during selected periods when a video scanning signal is in an observation region window of interest to facilitate scanning only from objects which appear in selectively defined windows of a viewing area, comprising, an addressable memory for storing information indicating the starting and ending boundaries of each window of interest in a viewing area, a memory address driver for addressing locations in memory containing the stored boundary information for a horizontal scan line in response to a horizontal scan line signal, a counter for receiving horizontal and vertical synchronous signals and for providing a video scanning position output signal, and a comparator circuit for receiving the video scanning position output signal from the counter and the starting and ending boundary data from the memory, and for producing a window output signal when the video scanning position is within the boundaries of a window. A scan data memory receives and stores data from objects within the windows.

My question: what does that actually mean?

Sounds something like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_jllEvrOZQ