Cork Researchers Enable Robust Image Capture of Unattenuated Bright Targets With Smart Camera

The Coded Access Optical Sensor (CAOS) smart camera has demonstrated enhanced imaging capabilities by imaging bright targets in the visible band.

In early 2016, professor Nabeel Riza and his team from University College Cork made the multispectrum camera technology work in unison with today’s CCD/CMOS/FPS sensors to pull out image features reaching a record 136 dB linear dynamic range. The team has now demonstrated robust and higher speed simultaneous pixels imaging of targets in the visible range without engaging any optical attenuation that can otherwise eliminate faint targets within an extreme dynamic range scene and reduce image quality of the bright targets.

The research shows that the CMOS mode of the CAOS smart camera is first engaged with optimized optical attenuation and CMOS sensor integration time control to provide an initial contour-guiding best acquirable map of the target space. As is visually seen, this image map of an irregular shaped target sign “L” is lacking in pixel irradiance data robustness due to inherent limitations in commercial multi-pixel CMOS sensors.

By engaging the new fast image capture CDMA-mode of the CAOS camera, a high-pixel irradiance robustness image map is successfully captured without the use of any optical attenuation subjected to the incident scene light. These new demonstrated capabilities of the multispectrum CAOS smart camera can create impact in various scenarios with bright targets within extreme dynamic range scenes such as in automotive vision, laser metrology, biomedical imaging, defense and industrial machine vision.