MICHAEL LAWRENCE REISCH
Pilots at Nathan Ln, Carlisle, MA

5128692, Jul 7, 1992

Feb 11, 1991

7/653416

Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G01D 1514, H04N 1036

346107R

Apparatus for effecting center pulse width modulation of electronic printer lighter emitting elements is disclosed. The most significaant bit of the energization pulse for the printer light emitting elements is centered and each succeeding less significant bit is divided in half so as to form a mirror image on each side of the centered most significant bit.

5729631, Mar 17, 1998

May 15, 1995

8/440639

Munib A. Wober - Haverhill MA
Yibing Yang - Arlington MA
Ibrahim Hajjahmad - Malden MA
Lon E. Sunshine - Boston MA
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G60K 936

382232

The invention relates to a novel process and system for removing noise from an image by first noise modeling an image signal source to generate noise masks and LUT values characteristic of noise at different frequency levels for each channel, and then applying the stored noise masks and LUT values to an image signal for noise removal. The image is first captured as an electronic image signal by the image signal source, then represented by a pyramid structure whereby each successive level of the pyramid is constructed from DC values of the previous level, and each level of the pyramid corresponds to a different frequency band of the image signal. A Wiener variant filter using DCT transforms is used to filter DCT coefficients at each level. The image is restored with reduced noise by replacing DC values with next level IDCT coefficients then performing an IDCT on the results.

5774598, Jun 30, 1998

May 15, 1995

8/440631

Lon E. Sunshine - Boston MA
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA
Munib A. Wober - Haverhill MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G06K 936, G06K 946

382250

An image processing system for sample rate conversion of an image signal representing an image of pixels from a first sample rate to a second sample rate includes: an image acquisition device for acquiring the image signal from an image signal source at the first sample rate; a first memory for buffering the input signal; a second memory for storing predetermined discrete cosine transform coefficients; a dot product multiplier for multiplying the image signal retrieved from the first memory times the predetermined coefficients to produce an output signal at the second sampling rate; a third memory for buffering the output signal; control sequencer logic for controlling operation of the image processing system; and an output device for providing a resampled image at the second sampling rate from the output signal. The image processing system facilitates sample rate conversion by segmenting the image into segments of image data points wherein a separate and different offset is determined for each segment. A discrete cosine transform is performed on each segment of image data points to generate corresponding DCT coefficients.

5740284, Apr 14, 1998

May 18, 1995

8/427457

Munib A. Wober - Haverhill MA
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G06K 903, H04N 1415

382250

Image processing methods and apparatus by which images in the spatial domain can be represented in the frequency domain through the use of discrete cosine transforms, conveniently operated on to achieve scaling and filtering effects while in the frequency domain, and then retransformed to the spatial domain or stored, displayed, reproduced or transmitted to distant locations for subsequent reuse. The scaling techniques which the invention utilizes can be for image enlargement by interpolation or image reduction by decimation. In the case of decimation, a filtering operation preferably is first performed in the frequency domain to avoid artifacts in the decimation process. The filtering operation is mathematically equivalent to a linear convolution in the spatial domain as a consequence of the properties of the DCT transformation. In both interpolation and decimation procedures, use is made of a hybrid inverse discrete cosine transform in which the series of cosine terms are evaluated at values arrived at by scaling ratio considerations, rather than the usual sampling index increments. As a consequence, image data points other than original image data in the spatial domain can be created or replaced by an approximation technique which involves transforming the image data points to frequency space by a series of terms that can be considered to be continuous over the range of the sampling index corresponding to the original image data.

5887084, Mar 23, 1999

Nov 7, 1997

8/966140

Munib A. Wober - Wakefield MA
Yibing Yang - Arlington MA
Ibrahim Hajjahmad - Someville MA
Lon E. Sunshine - Machester NH
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G06K 936, G06K 946

382250

A method or system for structuring an image which corresponds to an original array of pixels, as a forward discrete even cosine transform (DCT) pyramid having a predetermined number of levels where each level is associated with a different DCT frequency band, includes, respectively, the steps or functionality of: partitioning the original array into blocks of overlapped pixels; taking a DCT of each block of overlapped pixels to generate blocks of first level DCT coefficients forming a first level of the DCT pyramid; storing the first level of the DCT pyramid; selecting and storing at least one of the first level DCT coefficients of each block of first level DCT coefficients into a first temporary array; partitioning the first temporary array into blocks of overlapped coefficients; and taking a DCT of each block of overlapped coefficients of the first temporary array to generate blocks of second level DCT coefficients forming a second level of the DCT pyramid. Additional levels can be created by repeating the previous steps, and the processed image can be restored by reversing the above sequence of steps using inverse discrete even cosine transforms.

5706216, Jan 6, 1998

Jul 28, 1995

8/508745

Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

G06F 1700

36471502

A system for filtering an image during data compression using a standard JPEG compression/decompression chip typically requires a separate spatial filter external to the chip. The spatial filter is composed of numerous shift registers, flip-flops, multipliers and at least one adder. In contrast, an image filtering system which filters in the frequency domain using the inventive JPEG compression chip modified for filtering in the frequency domain does not require the separate spatial filter and its many components. The modified JPEG chip includes a raster to block converter which converts an image signal into 8. times. 8 blocks, a DCT processor which converts the 8. times. 8 blocks into DCT coefficients, a multiplier which generates filtered DCT coefficients by multiplying predetermined filtering coefficients times the DCT coefficients, a quantizer which generates quantized blocks to a predetermined level stored in a visibility table by quantizing the filtered coefficients, a zigzag scanner which generates a vector having the same number of elements as the quantized blocks, a run-length coder for determining the appropriate run-length according to entropy encoding received from a preloaded Huffman table, and a variable length code packer/unpacker for compressing the entropy encoded vector. A block to raster converter is included to reformat decompressed data.

5933537, Aug 3, 1999

Jul 2, 1997

8/887093

Ibrahim Hajjahmad - Somerville MA
Munib A. Wober - Haverhill MA
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

G06T 900, H04N 1415

382250

A method and apparatus are disclosed for converting frequency-coefficient matrices between a configuration in which the matrices are transforms of unoverlapped image-data matrices and a configuration in which the matrices are transforms of overlapped image-data matrices, the image-data matrices comprising image-data terms corresponding to pixels from an original image, the method comprising the steps of: deriving a conversion matrix; transposing the conversion matrix; matrix multiplying a first frequency-coefficient matrix of one configuration by the conversion matrix; matrix multiplying a second frequency-coefficient matrix of the same configuration by the transpose conversion matrix; and combining the product results to form a matrix formatted in the other configuration.

2004020, Oct 21, 2004

May 12, 2004

10/844286

Alain Bouchard - Boston MA, US
Brian Busch - Sudbury MA, US
Daniel Bybell - Medford MA, US
Anemarie DeYoung - Lexington MA, US
Sandra Lawrence - Brookline MA, US
Michael Reisch - Carlisle MA, US
Suhail Saquib - Shrewsbury MA, US
Dana Schuh - Windham NH, US
Stephen Telfer - Arlington MA, US
Jay Thornton - Watertown MA, US
William Vetterling - Lexington MA, US
Michael Viola - Burlington MA, US

Polaroid Corporation

B41J002/355

347/183000

A thermal printer is disclosed which includes a plurality of thermal print heads, each of the plurality of thermal print heads being operable to print a distinct one of a plurality of colors. The plurality of thermal print heads may print output at a plurality of spatial resolutions. The thermal printer may include dot size varying means for varying perceived levels of color printed by the thermal printer by varying sizes of dots printed by the plurality of thermal print heads. The printer may perform various image processing steps on an image to be printed, such as tone scale adjustment, thermal history control, and common mode voltage correction, to improve the perceived quality of the printed image. The thermal printer may be incorporated into a digital photo-printing vending machine for printing images provided by a customer.

6842186, Jan 11, 2005

Feb 22, 2002

10/080883

Alain Bouchard - Boston MA, US
Brian D. Busch - Sudbury MA, US
Daniel P. Bybell - Medford MA, US
Anemarie DeYoung - Lexington MA, US
Sandra B. Lawrence - Brookline MA, US
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA, US
Suhail S. Saquib - Shrewsbury MA, US
Dana F. Schuh - Windham NH, US
Stephen J. Telfer - Arlington MA, US
Jay E. Thornton - Watertown MA, US
William T. Vetterling - Lexington MA, US
Michael S. Viola - Burlington MA, US

Polaroid Corporation - Waltham MA

B41J 237

347188

A thermal printer is disclosed which includes a plurality of thermal print heads, each of the plurality of thermal print heads being operable to print a distinct one of a plurality of colors. The plurality of thermal print heads may print output at a plurality of spatial resolutions. The thermal printer may include dot size varying means for varying perceived levels of color printed by the thermal printer by varying sizes of dots printed by the plurality of thermal print heads. The printer may perform various image processing steps on an image to be printed, such as tone scale adjustment, thermal history control, and common mode voltage correction, to improve the perceived quality of the printed image. The thermal printer may be incorporated into a digital photo-printing vending machine for printing images provided by a customer.

5563718, Oct 8, 1996

Nov 30, 1993

8/159733

Munib A. Wober - Haverhill MA
Michael L. Reisch - Carlisle MA

Polaroid Corporation - Cambridge MA

H04N 1415

358432

Image coding methods and apparatus employing discrete cosine transforms for supressing and/or reducing blocking artifacts using a JPEG file format. The methods can be implemented on JPEG hardware slightly modified to provide access to discrete cosine transform coefficients. Filtering techniques by which an overlap procedure for implementing the inventive methods are also disclosed.