Title
Bits From Photons: Oversampled Image Acquisition Using Binary Poisson Statistics
Abstract
We study a new image sensor that is reminiscent of a traditional photographic film. Each pixel in the sensor has a binary response, giving only a 1-bit quantized measurement of the local light intensity. To analyze its performance, we formulate the oversampled binary sensing scheme as a parameter estimation problem based on quantized Poisson statistics. We show that, with a single-photon quantization threshold and large oversampling factors, the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the estimation variance approaches that of an ideal unquantized sensor, i.e., as if there were no quantization in the sensor measurements. Furthermore, the CRLB is shown to be asymptotically achievable by the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE). By showing that the log-likelihood function of our problem is concave, we guarantee the global optimality of iterative algorithms in finding the MLE. Numerical results on both synthetic data and images taken by a prototype sensor verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of our image reconstruction algorithm. They also suggest the potential application of the oversampled binary sensing scheme in high dynamic range photography.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/TIP.2011.2179306
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
image sensors,maximum likelihood estimator,photometry,image sensor,digital photography,sensors,quantization,photonics,transducers,lower bound,photography,cramer rao lower bound,semiconductors,image reconstruction,computational photography,stochastic processes,iterative algorithm,poisson distribution,information theory,parameter estimation,log likelihood function,computer aided design,synthetic data,poisson statistics,likelihood function,global optimization,maximum likelihood estimate,maximum likelihood estimation,sample size
Iterative reconstruction,Cramér–Rao bound,Computer vision,Oversampling,Image sensor,Computational photography,Artificial intelligence,Estimation theory,Quantization (signal processing),Mathematics,Estimator
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
4
1941-0042
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.75
5
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Feng Yang18611.70
Yue M. Lu267760.17
Luciano Sbaiz38411.42
Martin Vetterli4139262397.68