CAOS-CMOS Camera Promises 1000x Dynamic Range Improvement

LaserFocusWorld: Nabeel A. Riza, University College Cork, Ireland, and colleagues say to have demonstrated the Coded Access Optical Sensor (CAOS) CMOS camera, or CAOS-CMOS, with a three-orders-of-magnitude improvement in camera DR when compared to a conventional CMOS camera.

"Light from an external object is directed by a lens (L1) onto the agile pixels plane of a programmable digital micromirror device (DMD). To initiate the imaging operation, the DMD micromirrors are set to spatially route the incident light to the CMOS sensor to create an initial target-scene irradiance map. Based on this initial image intelligence, the DMD is programmed in its CAOS mode to create specifically located agile pixels that sample image zones of interest.

This agile-pixel programming capability via the DMD allows the agile pixels to operate with different time-frequency coding methods such as frequency/code/time division multiple access (FDMA/CDMA/TDMA) schemes common in cell-phone radio-frequency (RF) communications.

Experiments demonstrate a CAOS-CMOS camera dynamic range of 82.06 dB, which can be improved upon by further optimization of the camera hardware and image processing.
“The CAOS camera platform, when used in unison with current multipixel sensor camera technology, is envisioned to enable users to make a smart extreme-dynamic-range camera, opening up a world of the yet unseen,” says Nabeel Riza."

Nabeel Riza publishes a Youtube video explaining the CAOS-CMOS camera principles:



Update: A new paper "Demonstration of 136 dB dynamic range capability for a simultaneous dual optical band CAOS camera" by Nabeel A. Riza and Pablo La Torre has been published in Optics Express. "...the experimental camera demonstrates an agile pixel extreme dynamic range of 136 dB, which is a 56 dB improvement over the previous CAOS-imaging demonstrations."