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High dynamic camera

October 25, 2004

Every good picture tells a story of light / dark contrasts. Before lights and shadows can be properly displayed, the film or digital chip must cope with a wide dynamic range. A highly sensitive CMOS camera is capable of doing just that.

Photographers must be unassuming; among other things when it comes to dealing with the range of black and white tonal values in their images. Scenes with an unalterably wide brightness scale present a dilemma. At the extreme ends of the picture's grayscale, the brightness areas can "burn out" adjacent details and the darkest areas can "bleed" to the extent of completely obscuring. The effect is that depending on the exposure selected, the contrast nuances in some areas of the image are irretrievably lost.

The human eye is more sophisticated however. Depending on what direction the eyes focus, the pupils rapidly adjust themselves to light and dark. The brain merges the images and provides a wider tonal value range than the retina is actually capable of perceiving. Constant change - such as the glaring headlights of oncoming cars at night - can naturally cause fatigue, reducing the ability to discern contrasts.

A camera developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS won't be blinded by even harder situations. Using the example of the human eye, the camera records 50 full images per second. The integrated electronics select up to four contiguous images with different exposure times. Those areas with the best exposure quality are combined in real-time by a multi-exposure algorithm.

The result is a black and white image that boasts a maximum dynamic range of 118 decibels. Amateur digital cameras in comparison yield around 60 dB. The number of presentable gray values provides a better layman's comparison: 1,000,000 as opposed to 1,000.

An additional, important value comes into play when conventional cameras perceive only black at 1/50-second exposure. Group leader Werner Brockherde explains: "A recording sensitivity of 33 microwatts per square meter - this equates to less than five millilux - is extremely high. This is a world record for a high dynamic range CMOS camera with linear characteristics."

The technology, originally designed for an optical lane recognition system on behalf of BMW, will be further developed by the IMS spin-off Helion GmbH. The researchers are now investigating new applications. The technology is a good fit for all monitoring tasks that involve a high contrast range - welding for example - or for traffic monitoring applications that must cope with the extreme light contrast of day and night operation.

The CMOS sensors and a camera prototype were just on display at the VISION international trade show for industrial image processing and ID technologies in Stuttgart.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

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