基于单光子雪崩二极管的图像传感器在量子极限下的高动态范围成像

High Dynamic Range Imaging at the Quantum Limit with Single Photon Avalanche Diode-Based Image Sensors.

作者信息

Dutton Neale A W, Al Abbas Tarek, Gyongy Istvan, Mattioli Della Rocca Francescopaolo, Henderson Robert K

机构信息

STMicroelectronics Imaging Division, Tanfield, Edinburgh EH3 5DA, UK.

School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK.

出版信息

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Apr 11;18(4):1166. doi: 10.3390/s18041166.

DOI:10.3390/s18041166

PMID:29641479

原文链接:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5948723/

Abstract

This paper examines methods to best exploit the High Dynamic Range (HDR) of the single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) in a high fill-factor HDR photon counting pixel that is scalable to megapixel arrays. The proposed method combines multi-exposure HDR with temporal oversampling in-pixel. We present a silicon demonstration IC with 96 × 40 array of 8.25 µm pitch 66% fill-factor SPAD-based pixels achieving >100 dB dynamic range with 3 back-to-back exposures (short, mid, long). Each pixel sums 15 bit-planes or binary field images internally to constitute one frame providing 3.75× data compression, hence the 1k frames per second (FPS) output off-chip represents 45,000 individual field images per second on chip. Two future projections of this work are described: scaling SPAD-based image sensors to HDR 1 MPixel formats and shrinking the pixel pitch to 1-3 µm.

摘要

本文研究了在高填充因子的高动态范围（HDR）光子计数像素中最佳利用单光子雪崩二极管（SPAD）高动态范围的方法，该像素可扩展至百万像素阵列。所提出的方法将多曝光HDR与像素内的时间过采样相结合。我们展示了一款基于硅的演示集成电路，其具有96×40阵列的间距为8.25 µm、填充因子为66%的基于SPAD的像素，通过3次连续曝光（短、中、长）实现了>100 dB的动态范围。每个像素在内部对15个位平面或二进制场图像进行求和以构成一帧，实现了3.75倍的数据压缩，因此每秒1000帧（FPS）的片外输出代表芯片上每秒45,000个单独的场图像。本文还描述了这项工作的两个未来展望：将基于SPAD的图像传感器扩展到HDR 100万像素格式，以及将像素间距缩小到1 - 3 µm。