Imperfections in an imaging system’s capture process manifest themselves in the form of deviations from the expected signal. We call these imperfections ‘noise’ because they introduce grain and artifacts in our images. The fewer the imperfections, the lower the noise, the higher the image quality.
However, because the Human Visual System is adaptive within its working range, it’s not the absolute amount of noise that matters to perceived Image Quality (IQ) as much as the amount of noise relative to the signal – represented for instance by the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). That’s why to characterize the performance of a sensor in addition to signal and noise we also need to determine its sensitivity and the maximum signal it can detect.
In this series of articles I will describe how to use the Photon Transfer method and a spreadsheet to determine basic IQ performance metrics of a digital camera sensor. It is pretty easy if we keep in mind the simple model of how light information is converted into raw data by digital cameras:
