Provided is an image display system in which image data of a commercial product as an article (8) is freely selected and given to a purchaser by using two-way communication such as Internet and the article (8) can be observed from a view point desired by the purchaser. In this system, the article (8) is placed on a turn table (16) which rotates around a rotational axis (15), an image is taken by a camera (9) installed on a wrist (19) of a robot (18) of plural axes while keeping camera posture Nv so that an optical axis (21) of the camera (9) passes through an observation point of the article (8), for example, a flower, and image data for respective plural imaging positions are stored in the memory (31). An operator specifies the imaging position continuously so that the image data corresponding to the specified imaging position is read out from the memory (31) and displayed by a display means (28) with a control means.

Shootings for automatic following are previously registered in a memory of a pan head controller. When the automatic following is started, a CPU of the pan head controller chooses a shooting among the shootings registered in the memory according to a center position of a subject inputted from an image processing device so that the subject is in a frame of a camera, and transmits a control signal to a pan head for the shooting.

An adaptive electronic zoom system is described which includes an electronic camera having an image sensor with pixels, a controller communicating with an address generator to select in response to an external input or feedback signals from the electronic camera a subset of pixels from the pixels of the image sensor, the subset of pixels defining a zoom area. The zoom area can be located at any position within the image sensor area. The zoom ratio/pan/tilt of the zoom area is automatically adjusted so as to maintain the location of the zoom area entirely within the image sensor area. The adaptive electronic zoom system is particularly suited for set-top boxes for video conferencing applications.

A portable phone which is a manual operating apparatus of an image capturing system has an image processing section 340, an operation control section 341 and a communication section 342. The image processing section 340 acquires information regarding view position of a camera from image data 110 received by the communication section 342 and generates view position data 102. Also, it receives from the operation control section 341 information regarding an inputted optical operation command and generates garget position data 111. Furthermore, it performs a necessary process on the image data 110 to display the same on an image display section 32, as well as displays a view position of the camera and a target position of visual field after driving of the camera based on the view position data 102 and the target position data 111.

A system and method for using computer image processing for selectable task-based digital video compression is described. The system is intended to reduce travel of experts and let these experts direct field agents in performing tasks remotely. The tasks to be performed in the remote field can be monitoring, manipulating, and navigating. A field agent performs the manipulation and navigation operations, this agent can be a human being or a robot. The task-based compression algorithms use computer vision techniques to extract the bare minimum amount of information from the remote field scenery to allow the task to be performed. High frame rate photo-realistic reconstruction of the remote scene is not generally necessary.