"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). 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 1024×1024 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."
I am thrilled to see this work finally published and many thanks to the group at Purdue for their pioneering scholarship in this "first." Thanks also to JJ and team at Gigajot, and of course thanks to TSMC for partnership on implementation.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I make the same comments as I do for most Arxiv publications. This paper could be improved by peer review and more rigor as applied to "regular" archival journal publications. And to our community, I note it is not written for us, it is more on the computer vision and computational imaging side. There are no details on the color part, and many things still to characterize on the jot-pixel performance (crosstalk, etc.). That work will happen at Gigajot or Dartmouth, perhaps.
Nevertheless, still very happy to finally see our color jot-pixel work published and shared with the community in some form, which is the value of Arxiv.