A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a major technology used in digital imaging.
In digital imaging, a pixel, pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smallest element that can be manipulated through software.
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue.
A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices like smartphones with the same or more capabilities and features of dedicated cameras. High-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals and those who desire to take higher-quality photographs.
The Foveon X3 sensor is a digital camera image sensor designed by Foveon, Inc., and manufactured by Dongbu Electronics. It uses an array of photosites that consist of three vertically stacked photodiodes. Each of the three stacked photodiodes has a different spectral sensitivity, allowing it to respond differently to different wavelengths. The signals from the three photodiodes are then processed as additive color data that are transformed to a standard RGB color space.
A dichroic prism is a prism that splits light into two beams of differing wavelength (colour). A trichroic prism assembly combines two dichroic prisms to split an image into 3 colours, typically as red, green and blue of the RGB colour model. They are usually constructed of one or more glass prisms with dichroic optical coatings that selectively reflect or transmit light depending on the light's wavelength. That is, certain surfaces within the prism act as dichroic filters. These are used as beam splitters in many optical instruments.
Super CCD is a proprietary charge-coupled device that has been developed by Fujifilm since 1999. The Super CCD uses octagonal, rather than rectangular, pixels. This allows a higher horizontal and vertical resolution to be achieved than a traditional sensor of an equivalent pixel count.
Image noise is random variation of brightness or color information in images, and is usually an aspect of electronic noise. It can be produced by the image sensor and circuitry of a scanner or digital camera. Image noise can also originate in film grain and in the unavoidable shot noise of an ideal photon detector. Image noise is an undesirable by-product of image capture that obscures the desired information. Typically the term “image noise” is used to refer to noise in 2D images, not 3D images.
The FinePix S7000 is a 6.3 megapixel digital camera manufactured by Fujifilm. It was announced in July 2003, and has since been discontinued. It features 6x optical zoom.
Bryce Edward Bayer was an American scientist who invented the Bayer filter pattern, which is used in most modern color digital cameras. He has been called "the maestro without whom photography as we know wouldn't have been the same."
A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed, and contain large amounts of potentially redundant data. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter, in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.
Demosaicing, also known as color reconstruction, is a digital image processing algorithm used to reconstruct a full color image from the incomplete color samples output from an image sensor overlaid with a color filter array (CFA) such as a Bayer filter. It is also known as CFA interpolation or debayering.
An image sensor or imager is a sensor that detects and conveys information used to form an image. It does so by converting the variable attenuation of light waves into signals, small bursts of current that convey the information. The waves can be light or other electromagnetic radiation. Image sensors are used in electronic imaging devices of both analog and digital types, which include digital cameras, camera modules, camera phones, optical mouse devices, medical imaging equipment, night vision equipment such as thermal imaging devices, radar, sonar, and others. As technology changes, electronic and digital imaging tends to replace chemical and analog imaging.
In digital photography, the CYGM filter is an alternative color filter array to the Bayer filter (GRGB). It similarly uses a mosaic of pixel filters, of cyan, yellow, green and magenta, and so also requires demosaicing to produce a full-color image.
In digital imaging, a color filter array (CFA), or color filter mosaic (CFM), is a mosaic of tiny color filters placed over the pixel sensors of an image sensor to capture color information.
In digital photography, the RGBE filter is an alternative color filter array to the Bayer filter (GRGB). It similarly uses a mosaic of pixel filters, of red, green, blue and "emerald", and so also requires demosaicing to produce a full-color image. It was developed by Sony and so far is used only in the ICX456 8-megapixel CCD and in the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F828 camera.
An image processor, also known as an image processing engine, image processing unit (IPU), or image signal processor (ISP), is a type of media processor or specialized digital signal processor (DSP) used for image processing, in digital cameras or other devices. Image processors often employ parallel computing even with SIMD or MIMD technologies to increase speed and efficiency. The digital image processing engine can perform a range of tasks. To increase the system integration on embedded devices, often it is a system on a chip with multi-core processor architecture.
Colour co-site sampling is a system of photographic colour sensing, wherein 4, 16 or 36 images are collected from the sensor and merged to form a single image. Each subsequent image physically moves the sensor by exactly one pixel, in order to collect R, G and B data for each pixel, known as microscanning. This is a viable alternative to the typical Bayer filter array of pixels which returns a lower quality images with interpolated pixel colours.
The Fujifilm X-Trans is a sensor developed by Fujifilm and used in its Fujifilm X series cameras. Unlike most sensors featuring a conventional Bayer filter array, X-Trans sensors have a unique 6 by 6 pattern of photosites. Fujifilm claims that this layout can minimise moiré effects, and in turn increase resolution by eliminating the need for a low-pass filter.
Peter L. P. Dillon is an American physicist, and the inventor of integral color image sensors.. and single-chip color video cameras. The curator of the Technology Collection at the George Eastman Museum, Todd Gustavson, has stated that "the color sensor technology developed by Peter Dillon has revolutionized all forms of color photography. These color sensors are now ubiquitous in products such as smart phone cameras, digital cameras and camcorders, digital cinema cameras, medical cameras, automobile cameras, and drones". Dillon joined Kodak Research Labs in 1959 and retired from Kodak in 1991. He lives in Pittsford, New York.
