Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Altasens and Apical Announce HD Video WDR Sensor

PR Newswire: AltaSens and Apical, a provider of advanced hardware IP cores and software libraries for WDR imaging, announce the development of 1/3-inch 1080p60 HD WDR sensor.

AltaSens' A3372E3-4T WDR sensor uses patent-pending dual exposures in a single frame to create more than 100dB of wide dynamic range for 1080p60 HD imaging. Each exposure is independently adjustable to light levels in any scene. Single-frame dual exposures eliminate the need for a dedicated frame buffer in the camera and provide video, devoid of motion artifacts. The PR also pitch uncompromized low-light performance of the sensor.

AltaSens will be demonstrating live WDR 1080p60 HD video streams during the 2010 ISC West Security Show in Las Vegas on March 24-26.

7 comments:

  1. What's the difference between this and Aptina's HDR sensor?

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  2. Aptina uses an on-chip buffer to aligne the double exposed images at the output.

    This approach should be very similar to that of SMaL by using a 2 levels on the reset transistor. Maybe 4-T sensing is not possible ?

    This is only my feeling ...

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  3. How do they manage to reach 100dB using only 2 exposure times ? My feeling is that either the pixel has a huge dynamic range in usual mode or the SNR curve is not really good !

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  4. You can have any dynamic range as you like with double exposure, for example:
    1st exposure time = 20ms and 2nd one = 100ns.
    This will give you 106dB dynamic range extension ... So easy !

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  5. Yes for sure, you can set all the exposure time you want.. :) But in your case, 200 000 for the difference between the both exposure times induces a huge digital gain for the display to enhance constrast. So you will have either a very noisy picture or you will not see any benefit on your dynamic range extension. Indeed, your image will be to much compressed...

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  6. To be clear, you can't have "any DNR you want" with two exposure times. You can have at most double the DNR of your pixel. So, for a pixel with 60dB, you can have at most 120dB (of continuous data).

    If you make the difference between exposure times too long, there will be a range of illumination levels that saturate the long-exposure pixel but are below the noise floor of the short-exposure pixel. You'll have a gap in the data.

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  7. Can somewhat comment on motion artifact in this sensor

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