CMOS IMAGE SENSOR HAVING BLOCK SCANNING CAPABILITY

A CMOS image sensor includes a plurality of pixel sensors arranged in a two-dimensional array. In each pixel sensor, a signal corresponding to the absolute value of the amount of incident light with reduced reset noise is obtained. The signals of the respective pixel sensors are then output in a block scanning fashion. The CMOS image sensor does not need to include a preprocessing circuit for discrete cosine transform or a high-capacity frame memory for raster scanning.