What Does a One-Bit Quanta Image Sensor Offer?
Stanley H. Chan

TL;DR
This paper provides theoretical insights into the advantages of one-bit quanta image sensors, highlighting their benefits in low-light conditions, high frame rates, and increased dynamic range through signal processing analysis.
Contribution
The paper offers the first theoretical analysis supporting the benefits of one-bit QIS, including optimal frame rate, low-light performance, and dynamic range enhancement.
Findings
Better low-light performance with error-free measurements at appropriate exposure.
Derivation of a closed-form expression for optimal frame rate considering read noise.
Theoretical proof of increased dynamic range due to nonlinearity and exposure bracketing.
Abstract
The one-bit quanta image sensor (QIS) is a photon-counting device that captures image intensities using binary bits. Assuming that the analog voltage generated at the floating diffusion of the photodiode follows a Poisson-Gaussian distribution, the sensor produces either a ``1'' if the voltage is above a certain threshold or ``0'' if it is below the threshold. The concept of this binary sensor has been proposed for more than a decade, and physical devices have been built to realize the concept. However, what benefits does a one-bit QIS offer compared to a conventional multi-bit CMOS image sensor? Besides the known empirical results, are there theoretical proofs to support these findings? The goal of this paper is to provide new theoretical support from a signal processing perspective. In particular, it is theoretically found that the sensor can offer three benefits: (1) Low-light:…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors · Analytical Chemistry and Sensors · Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Design
MethodsSPEED: Separable Pyramidal Pooling EncodEr-Decoder for Real-Time Monocular Depth Estimation on Low-Resource Settings · Diffusion
