A video scanner

A major problem encountered in adapting a digital computer to deal with the real world is that of providing the computer with sensory information. This paper describes a video scanner system for providing a computer with a rudimentary sense of sight. The video scanner described hereby uses a closed circuit television system to generate an electronic analog of a real world scene and then directly transforms this analog into a matrix of binary numbers which represent the light intensities at discrete points in the scene. A particular advantage of this direct transformation is that no special preparation of the visual information is necessary. The system is capable of transforming literally any image which can be received by the television camera. Possible applications for the system include input for scene analysis, object identification and optical measurement .