This article is a little esoteric so one may want to skip it unless one is interested in the underlying mechanisms that cause quantization error as photographic signal and noise approach the darkest levels of acceptable dynamic range in our digital cameras: one least significant bit in the raw data. We will use our simplified camera model and deal with Poissonian Signal and Gaussian Read Noise separately – then attempt to bring them together.
Tag Archives: signal
Photographic Sensor Simulation
Physicists and mathematicians over the last few centuries have spent a lot of their time studying light and electrons, the key ingredients of digital photography. In so doing they have left us with a wealth of theories to explain their behavior in nature and in our equipment. In this article I will describe how to simulate the information generated by a uniformly illuminated imaging system using open source Octave (or equivalently Matlab) utilizing some of these theories.
Since as you will see the simulations are incredibly (to me) accurate, understanding how the simulator works goes a long way in explaining the inner workings of a digital sensor at its lowest levels; and simulated data can be used to further our understanding of photographic science without having to run down the shutter count of our favorite SLRs. This approach is usually referred to as Monte Carlo simulation.
Information Theory for Photographers
Ever since Einstein we’ve been able to say that humans ‘see’ because information about the scene is carried to the eyes by photons reflected by it. So when we talk about Information in photography we are referring to information about the energy and distribution of photons arriving from the scene. The more complete this information, the better we ‘see’. No photons = no information = no see; few photons = little information = see poorly = poor IQ; more photons = more information = see better = better IQ.
Sensors in digital cameras work similarly, their output ideally being the energy and location of every photon incident on them during Exposure. That’s the full information ideally required to recreate an exact image of the original scene for the human visual system, no more and no less. In practice however we lose some of this information along the way during sensing, so we need to settle for approximate location and energy – in the form of photoelectron counts by pixels of finite area, often correlated to a color filter array.