IMAGE PICKUP DEVICE

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an image pickup device that can transmit a video signal from an image pickup means using a few signal lines, without deteriorating the S/N in analog way. SOLUTION: A pre-processing circuit 10b applies correlation duplex sampling to a video signal from an image pickup element 10a of an image pickup circuit 10, an automatic gain control 10c amplifies the processed video signal to have a required amplitude, a one-bit modulation circuit 11 samples the amplified signal to convert the signal into one-bit serial data, adds a device number to identify the image pickup element, a valid line number and a line number or the like to the serial data, and a serial interface 13 converts the data into a differential signal and an optical signal and transmits the converted signal to a signal processing section. A serial interface 14 of the signal processing section receives the serial data, a one-bit demodulation circuit 15 eliminates the device number, the line number and the valid line number, and a signal processing circuit 16 applies down-sampling to the one-bit data to convent the data into a PCM signal and to provide the output of the PCM signal.