Megapixel Photon-Counting Color Imaging using Quanta Image Sensor
Abstract
Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) is a single-photon detector designed for extremely low light imaging conditions. Majority of the existing QIS prototypes are monochrome based on single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD). Passive color imaging has not been demonstrated with single-photon detectors due to the intrinsic difficulty of shrinking the pixel size and increasing the spatial resolution while maintaining acceptable intra-pixel cross-talk. In this paper, we present image reconstruction of the first color QIS with a resolution of pixels, supporting both single-bit and multi-bit photon counting capability. Our color image reconstruction is enabled by a customized joint demosaicing-denoising algorithm, leveraging truncated Poisson statistics and variance stabilizing transforms. Experimental results of the new sensor and algorithm demonstrate superior color imaging performance for very low-light conditions with a mean exposure of as low as a few photons per pixel in both real and simulated images.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.09036,
title = {Megapixel Photon-Counting Color Imaging using Quanta Image Sensor},
author = {Abhiram Gnanasambandam and Omar Elgendy and Jiaju Ma and and Stanley H. Chan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09036},
year = {2019}
}