An articulated coupling apparatus utilized in connecting together, in a substantially semi-permanent fashion, adjacently disposed ends of a pair of railway cars includes male and female connection members. First and second types of time slots selected from receiving and transmitting type time slots are allocated as the first and second time slots, respectively, in a current frame. By a COR 4, this shading data is subtracted from the image data obtained from the sensor 1, and thereby the unevenness in the outputs from the individual pixels of the sensor 1 is corrected. 76 DSVD framing formats and stuffs bytes into the voice and data to form network packets. Electrical coupling of these individual ICs via the electrical interconnects of the ICs results in a single processing unit that is configured to perform functions specifically suited for a particular application or set of applications.