New digital camera sensor architecture for low light imaging

Abstract

In this paper, a novel digital camera sensor architecture to acquire images with high fidelity under low light conditions is proposed. Today, almost all digital cameras have only red, green, and blue color pixels. Due to their limited sensitivity to the wavelengths of visible light, the images captured using these color pixels under low light conditions are noisy. A new sensor architecture that has panchromatic pixels sensitive to all visible wavelengths along with the red, green, and blue pixels is proposed. Panchromatic pixels allow luminance information to be detected with higher sensitivity whereas red, green, and blue pixels produce the color information. Real images captured using the proposed sensor design are compared with the corresponding images obtained using a traditional digital camera having only red, green, and blue pixels. The results clearly show the feasibility of the proposed approach.