Claims
- 1. A panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control, comprising:a camera housing; an optical assembly including a lens mounted to said camera housing and having an optical axis that points along a linear direction; means for sweeping said linear direction that said optical axis points about a panoramic field of view; means coupled to said exposing means for providing a control waveform having an amplitude and a phase, whose amplitude is matched to existing lighting conditions and whose phase is matched to the position of the sun in the plane of camera rotation relative to the starting phase of the lens; and an exposure controller means, responsive to said control waveform, for controllably compensating exposure for the variations found in lighting about a typical outdoor panoramic scene in accord with said control waveform.
- 2. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 1, further including a keypad and a sun protractor having plural concentric sun declination rings indexed to the number of stops mounted for rotation with the camera housing, where said phase of said control waveform is read off the protractor and manually entered on said keypad, and where said amplitude of said control waveform is read off the appropriate one of the concentric sun declination rings, and it is entered on the keypad.
- 3. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 1, further including a clock providing information representative of time and date, an electronic compass providing information indexed to the starting phase of the lens and a device providing information representative of latitude and longitude coordinates of the panoramic scene, where said phase and amplitude of said control waveform are automatically determined from the information provided by said time and date clock, by said electronic compass, and by said latitude and longitude device.
- 4. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 3, wherein said information representative of latitude and longitude is provided by a GPS (global positioning satellite system).
- 5. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 3, wherein said information representative of latitude and longitude is provided by RAM table look-up.
- 6. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 1, further including a keypad, and where said amplitude of said control waveform is determined in response to operator input of information representative of existing lighting conditions on said keypad.
- 7. The panoramic camera providing automatic exposure control of claim 1, wherein said control waveform is a control sinewave.
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
This application is a division of U.S. utility application Ser. No. 08/826,992 entitled Panoramic Camera, filed Apr. 12, 1997 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,950,018, which is a continuation in part of U.S. utility patent application Ser. No. 08/320,455 entitled Panoramic Camera, filed Oct. 11, 1994, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,804; and is related to divisional application entitled Panoramic Camera, Ser. No. 08/827,880 filed on Apr. 12, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,199, of U.S. utility application Ser. No. 08/320,455, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,199, all of which are of the same inventive entity as herein.
US Referenced Citations (9)
Continuations (1)
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Number |
Date |
Country |
Parent |
08/320455 |
Oct 1994 |
US |
Child |
08/826992 |
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US |