Effects of Cooling on the SNR and Contrast Detection of a Low-Light Event-Based Camera

Johnson-Nyquist noise is the electronic noise generated by the thermal agitation of charge carriers, which increases when the sensor overheats. Current high-speed cameras used in low-light conditions are often cooled down to reduce thermal noise and increase their signal to noise ratio. These sensor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems 2018-12, Vol.12 (6), p.1467-1474
Main Authors: Berthelon, Xavier, Chenegros, Guillaume, Finateu, Thomas, Ieng, Sio-Hoi, Benosman, Ryad
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Cameras
Cold Temperature
Computer Science
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computing time
Cooling
Cooling effects
Cooling systems
Current carriers
Equipment Design
Event-based
Frames per second
High speed cameras
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - instrumentation
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods
low-light
Microscopy
neuromorphic
Noise
Noise reduction
optical flow
Particle tracking
Peltier-effect
Sensors
Signal to noise ratio
Temperature measurement
Temperature sensors
Temporal resolution
Thermal noise
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Summary:Johnson-Nyquist noise is the electronic noise generated by the thermal agitation of charge carriers, which increases when the sensor overheats. Current high-speed cameras used in low-light conditions are often cooled down to reduce thermal noise and increase their signal to noise ratio. These sensors, however, record hundreds of frames per second, which takes time, requires energy, and heavy computing power due to the substantial data load. Event-based sensors benefit from a high temporal resolution and record the information in a sparse manner. Based on an asynchronous time-based image sensor, we developed another version of this event-based camera whose pixels were designed for low-light applications and added a Peltier-effect-based cooling system at the back of the sensor in order to reduce thermal noise. We show the benefits from thermal noise reduction and study the improvement of the signal to noise ratio in the estimation of event-based normal flow norm and angle and particle tracking in microscopy.
ISSN:1932-4545
1940-9990
DOI:10.1109/TBCAS.2018.2875202