Construction | Features | Spectral Properties
Imaging electronics, in addition to imaging optics, play a significant role in the performance of an imaging system. Proper integration of all components, including camera, capture board, software, and cables results in optimal system performance. Before delving into any additional topics, it is important to understand the camera sensor and key concepts and terminology associated with it.
The heart of any camera is the sensor; modern sensors are solid-state electronic devices containing up to millions of discrete photodetector sites called pixels. Although there are many camera manufacturers, the majority of sensors are produced by only a handful of companies. Still, two cameras with the same sensor can have very different performance and properties due to the design of the interface electronics. In the past, cameras used phototubes such as Vidicons and Plumbicons as image sensors. Though they are no longer used, their mark on nomenclature associated with sensor size and format remains to this day. Today, almost all sensors in machine vision fall into one of two categories: Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) and Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) imagers.
SENSOR CONSTRUCTION
Charge-Coupled Device (CCD)
The charge-coupled device (CCD) was invented in 1969 by scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA. For years, it was the prevalent technology for capturing images, from digital astrophotography to machine vision inspection. The CCD sensor is a silicon chip that contains an array of photosensitive sites (Figure 1). The term charge-coupled device actually refers to the method by which charge packets are moved around on the chip from the photosites to readout, a shift register, akin to the notion of a bucket brigade. Clock pulses create potential wells to move charge packets around on the chip, before being converted to a voltage by a capacitor. The CCD sensor is itself an analog device, but the output is immediately converted to a digital signal by means of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in digital cameras, either on or off chip. In analog cameras, the voltage from each site is read out in a particular sequence, with synchronization pulses added at some point in the signal chain for reconstruction of the image.
The charge packets are limited to the speed at which they can be transferred, so the charge transfer is responsible for the main CCD drawback of speed, but also leads to the high sensitivity and pixel-to-pixel consistency of the CCD. Since each charge packet sees the same voltage conversion, the CCD is very uniform across its photosensitive sites. The charge transfer also leads to the phenomenon of blooming, wherein charge from one photosensitive site spills over to neighboring sites due to a finite well depth or charge capacity, placing an upper limit on the useful dynamic range of the sensor. This phenomenon manifests itself as the smearing out of bright spots in images from CCD cameras.
To compensate for the low well depth in the CCD, microlenses are used to increase the fill factor, or effective photosensitive area, to compensate for the space on the chip taken up by the charge-coupled shift registers. This improves the efficiency of the pixels, but increases the angular sensitivity for incoming light rays, requiring that they hit the sensor near normal incidence for efficient collection.
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