"CMOS Image Sensors have become the principal technology in majority of digital cameras. They started replacing the film and Charge Coupled Devices in the last decade with the promise of lower cost, lower power requirement, higher integration and the potential of focal plane processing. However, the principal factor behind their success has been the ability to utilise the shrinkage in CMOS technology to make smaller pixels, and thereby have more resolution without increasing the cost. With the market of image sensors exploding courtesy their integration with communication and computation devices, technology developers improved the CMOS processes to have better optical performance. Nevertheless, the promises of focal plane processing as well as on-chip integration have not been fulfilled. The market is still being pushed by the desire of having higher number of pixels and better image quality, however, differentiation is being difficult for any image sensor manufacturer. In the paper, we will explore potential disruptive growth directions for CMOS Image sensors and ways to achieve the same."
Apparently modern CMOS image sensors appeared by immaculate conception according to this paper. There are many other holes in this evolution story as presented. Do people not do background research any more? The evolution story is pretty amazing involving hundreds or likely thousands of engineers around the globe with some pretty clear advancement milestones over the past 25 years. This paper does a disservice to much of the community.
ReplyDeleteThis paper is not attempting to give a detailed account of CMOS conception and development; it is trying to predict future evolutions and briefly describes how the authors are contributing. It points to the many constraints imposed by market forces for more pixels, and says that hopefully this differentiator has reached its limit. That is to doubt the ignorance of people prepared to purchase a 100+ megapixel telephone camera and then expect to record video in a nightclub.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, perhaps the title should have been more carefully chosen. I wonder how you picked what papers to reference and what to omit? Still seems sloppy to me, sorry to say. BTW, I think your example of the 100+ Mpix smartphone camera and nightclub video is totally doable. Be careful about calling people ignorant.
DeleteIndependent of what the purpose of the paper is, the content of the paper needs to be correct, and I do agree with Eric, that is not the case.
DeletePerhaps the title should have said "Future evolution..." but I did not write it as you imply. It is not good enough to call it "sloppy" when your main complaint appears to be that it didn't reference all the "thousands" of engineers (and a few scientists:-) who contributed to CMOS development, which would have been impossible. And being "totally doable" doesn't mean it's a good idea. Samsung's 108M pixel phone is pure marketing appeal to people who do not understand the technology and think bigger is better. Then they compress the photos drastically to be able to show them to Facebook friends.
DeleteThe future evolution of the paper seems to talk about compressive sensing, BSI, per pixel ADCs, ... These type of things have been explored already in literature. The references they use in the paper are also not really up to date, I didn't find a reference from beyond 2014.
DeleteAlso observe that this paper was originally published back in 2014 already (8th International Conference on Sensing Technology in Liverpool, UK). Why the journal has decided to accept and publish it as it is in 2020 I find highly questionable and may be a testament both to their quality standards and to the paper itself.
ReplyDelete