This is the first book published on CMOS imagers. It covers the full chain, starting from the basic concepts of photo transduction, and continues with pixel and system examples of CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) imagers. CMOS Imagers: From Phototransduction to Image Processing contains six contributed chapters. The first three detail the basic concepts of photo transduction, modeling, evaluation, and optimization of APS. The last three continue with the description of APS design issues using a bottom-up strategy, starting from pixels and finishing with image processing systems. Various focal-plane image processing alternatives to either improve imaging or to extract visual information are presented. The book closes with a discussion of a completely non-traditional method for image noise suppression. Targeted audiences for this work are people interested in imaging, whether from the academic, the industrial or the scientific arena. All students, engineers and technical workers interested in understanding more about the physics, the design and the potential of CMOS imagers are invited to read the book. Each chapter can also be read independently.
The idea of writing a book on CMOS imaging has been brewing for several years. It was placed on a fast track after we agreed to organize a tutorial on CMOS sensors for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2004). This tutorial defined the structure of the book, but as first time authors/editors, we had a lot to learn about the logistics of putting together information from multiple sources. Needless to say, it was a long road between the tutorial and the book, and it took more than a few months to complete. We hope that you will find our journey worthwhile and the collated information useful. The laboratories of the authors are located at many universities distributed around the world. Their unifying theme, however, is the advancement of knowledge for the development of systems for CMOS imaging and image processing. We hope that this book will highlight the ideas that have been pioneered by the authors, while providing a roadmap for new practitioners in this field to exploit exciting opportunities to integrate imaging and "smartness" on a single VLSI chip. The potential of these smart imaging systems is still unfulfilled. Hence, there is still plenty of research and development to be done.
The idea of writing a book on CMOS imaging has been brewing for several years. It was placed on a fast track after we agreed to organize a tutorial on CMOS sensors for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2004). This tutorial defined the structure of the book, but as first time authors/editors, we had a lot to learn about the logistics of putting together information from multiple sources. Needless to say, it was a long road between the tutorial and the book, and it took more than a few months to complete. We hope that you will find our journey worthwhile and the collated information useful. The laboratories of the authors are located at many universities distributed around the world. Their unifying theme, however, is the advancement of knowledge for the development of systems for CMOS imaging and image processing. We hope that this book will highlight the ideas that have been pioneered by the authors, while providing a roadmap for new practitioners in this field to exploit exciting opportunities to integrate imaging and "smartness" on a single VLSI chip. The potential of these smart imaging systems is still unfulfilled. Hence, there is still plenty of research and development to be done.