A spectrogram, also sometimes referred to as a periodogram, is a visual representation of the Power Spectrum of a signal. Power Spectrum answers the question “How much power is contained in the frequency components of the signal”. In digital photography a Power Spectrum can show the relative strength of repeating patterns in captures and whether processing has been applied.
In this article I will describe how you can construct a spectrogram and how to interpret it, using dark field raw images taken with the lens cap on as an example. This can tell us much about the performance of our imaging devices in the darkest shadows and how well tuned their sensors are there.
Figure 1. Horizontal and Vertical Spectrogram of noise captured in the raw data by a Nikon Z7 at base ISO with the lens cap on. The plot shows clear evidence of low-pass filtering in the blue CFA color plane and pattern noise repeating every 6 rows there and in one of the green ones.
My camera has a 14-bit ADC. Can it accurately record information lower than 14 stops below full scale? Can it store sub-LSB signals in the raw data?
With a well designed sensor the answer, unsurprisingly if you’ve followed the last few posts, is yes it can. The key to being able to capture such tiny visual information in the raw data is a well behaved imaging system with a properly dithered ADC. Continue reading Sub Bit Signal→
We’ve seen how information about a photographic scene is collected in the ISOless/invariant range of a digital camera sensor, amplified, converted to digital data and stored in a raw file. For a given Exposure the best information quality (IQ) about the scene is available right at the photosites, only possibly degrading from there – but a properly designed** fully ISO invariant imaging system is able to store it in its entirety in the raw data. It is able to do so because the information carrying capacity (photographers would call it the dynamic range) of each subsequent stage is equal to or larger than the previous one. Cameras that are considered to be (almost) ISOless from base ISO include the Nikon D7000, D7200 and the Pentax K5. All digital cameras become ISO invariant above a certain ISO, the exact value determined by design compromises.
Figure 1: Simplified Scene Information Transfer in an ISO Invariant Imaging System at base ISO
In this article we’ll look at a class of imagers that are not able to store the whole information available at the photosites in one go in the raw file for a substantial portion of their working ISOs. The photographer can in such a case choose out of the full information available at the photosites what smaller subset of it to store in the raw data by the selection of different in-camera ISOs. Such cameras are sometimes improperly referred to as ISOful. Most Canon DSLRs fall into this category today. As do kings of darkness such as the Sony a7S or Nikon D5.
We’ve seen how to model sensors and how to collect signal and noise statistics from the raw data of our digital cameras. In this post I am going to pull both things together allowing us to estimate sensor IQ metrics: input-referred read noise, clipping/saturation/Full Well Count, Dynamic Range, Pixel Response Non-Uniformities and gain/sensitivity.
There are several ways to extract these metrics from signal and noise data obtained from a camera’s raw file. I will show two related ones: via SNR in this post and via total noise N in the next. The procedure is similar and the results are identical.
