Image Sensors as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
1,183 words · ~5 min read
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whether it's snapping pictures of a new family member to share on social media
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recording footage to upload for co-workers or just taking a selfie for
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fun with the girls having a night on the town it cannot be disputed that digital
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photography has become standard to our modern way of living and while we take
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for granted that pretty much anyone can produce a phone that is spilling over
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with pictures of small humans and animals they adore have you ever stopped
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to think what makes all of this possible well even if you did the answer is image
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sensors and thanks to them we are now able to capture high quality photos and
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videos more directly into a digital format for easy usage instead of going
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through the cumbersome extra steps that we did historically you see kids back in
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the days of the ancient Pharaoh cameras used a specialized light sensitive
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plastic substance to capture images projected onto it through a lens known
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as F excuse me film you took a roll of it to the local chemist who developed it
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and gave you physical pictures which if you wanted to upload to your geoc city
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site needed to be scanned in a scanner now instead of using film to capture
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images today's digital sensors work hard to artificially mimic the transduction
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process of a biological eye in order to do all of this in a much more simple
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fashion well sort of simple transduction simply defined is the conversion of one
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energy form into another and whether this comes as a result of an organic or
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mechanical means is actually completely irrelevant so in the human eye rod and
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cone receptors work in combination with gangan cells to convert photons into an
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electrochemical signal which the occipital lobe in your brain can then
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process in the case of an image sensor though photons are captured as charged
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electrons in Silicon and converted to a voltage value through the use of
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capacitors and amplifiers then later transferred into digital code which can
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be processed by a computer while there are many ways of going about this most
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sensors operate in a similar manner to one another with the big difference that
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them being the way in which they process stimuli of these many types there are
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two more readily available in mature forms of sensors CCD and camos charge
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coupled device sensors work by registering Photon rays in Silicon which
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contains a grid array of pixels after electron charges are captured in this
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pixel array they are then processed from the bottom to the top of the grid into a
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Serial shift register and pushed out a single charge at a time to be converted
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into an analog volt that is then transformed into coding by
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way of an analog to digital converter since these sensors operate by
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processing charges individually across the lines of an array this system
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utilizes a respectable amount of power to function but this also gives it the
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benefit of being extremely low noise due to the minimized use of voltage
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amplifiers often making them better for particular types of Photography such as
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aerial or space this of course brings us
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to complimentary metal oxide semiconductors which are the type type
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of image sensor most commonly found in consumer grade products as I stated
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earlier most image sensors operate in a generally similar fashion so what makes
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these different from the CCD sensors just described is that instead of
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shuffling electron charges along an array to then be modified extra
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circuitry has been added to each pixel which allows it to do more or less all
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of the processing individually with the signal then being sent directly down the
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line to the CPU since there's no grid lock to be managed in this operation the
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power usage is actually reduced simultaneously with the added benefit of
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an increase in processing speed now while both of these sensor types have
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done well and continued to develop in their own sort of respective specialized
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Fields that's not to say that there isn't any room for future improvements
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though modern sensors have been wise in taking their inspiration from biology
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the processors which reconstruct the coded images sent to them have a ways to
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catch up if they want to uh give our
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brains a run for their money I mean you see the current answer to improving
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image quality in electronics is to increase pixel counts and fine-tune
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photo sensor sensitivities when the fact is that the eye that we use to sit in
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Judgment of all this stuff is correctly focused and a whopping 2% of our visual
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field or about twice the size of your thumbnail at Arms Reach meaning our
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brain is doing a lot of the work at picking up the slack but unless we want
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to resort to carrying around Xerox machines with us whenever we wish to
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share are important images then they'll just have to serve Us in the
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for sponsoring this episode as fast as possible thanks to you guys for watching
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it like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked and leave a comment if you have suggestions
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for future fastest possible just like this one and as always don't forget to
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