EMVA 1288 v.4 General Release Says Goodbye to Photon Transfer Curve

IMVE: EMVA 1288 publishes 4.0 release candidate of the standard. The main difference from the circa 2016 version 3.1 is the split into linear and general documents:

"Starting with Release 4, the EMVA 1288 standard includes two separate documents. The separate document describes Release 4 Linear and is a direct successor of Release 3.1 with a few changes and extensions. Release 4 Linear, as the name says, is limited to cameras and image sensors with a linear characteristic curve. Together with the photon transfer curve, the basic mean parameters temporal dark noise, system gain and quantum efficiencies can be determined.

This document Release 4 General can be used for much wider classes of cameras and image sensors. It no longer relies on a linear characteristic curve or that raw data are provided. The photon transfer curve is no longer used. The essential point is that basically the same measurements are performed, but they are analyzed in a different way providing still all important application relevant parameters.

While the previous releases of the standard focused on monochrome cameras with a single channel and additionally only included color cameras, Release 4 takes into account the significant advance of multimodal imaging, including polarization, multispectral and time-of-flight (depth imaging). Each of these multimodal sensors includes multiple channels.

If the raw data from these channels is available, each channel can be characterized with EMVA 1288 measurements. Polarization imaging serves as a model how the rich tool set of the standard can also be applied to parameters, computed from several channels, here the degree of polarization and the angle of (partially) polarized light."