A new testing method of SNR for cooled CCD imaging camera based on stationary wavelet transform

Abstract

Cooled CCD (charge coupled device) imaging camera has found wide application in the field of astronomy, color photometry, spectroscopy, medical imaging, densitometry, chemiluminescence and epifluorescence imaging. A Cooled CCD (CCCD) imaging camera differs from traditional CCD/CMOS imaging camera in that Cooled CCD imaging camera can get high resolution image even in the low illumination environment. SNR (signal noise ratio) is most popular parameter of digital image quality evaluation. Many researchers have proposed various SNR testing methods for traditional CCD imaging camera, however, which is seldom suitable to Cooled CCD imaging camera because of different main noise source. In this paper, a new testing method of SNR is proposed to evaluate the quality of image captured by Cooled CCD. Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) is introduced in the testing method for getting more exact image SNR value. The method proposed take full advantage of SWT in the image processing, which makes the experiment results accuracy and reliable. To further refining SNR testing results, the relation between SNR and integration time is also analyzed in this article. The experimental results indicate that the testing method proposed accords with the SNR model of CCCD. In addition, the testing values for one system are about one value, which show that the proposed testing method is robust.