1st Vision

SWIR Dynamic Operating Point Optimization – Explained

Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) imaging is enjoying double-digit growth rates, thanks to improving technologies and performance, and innovative applications. Unlike visible-light sensors, SWIR cameras can image through silicon, plastics, and other semitransparent materials. That’s really effective for many quality control applications, materials sorting and inspection, crop management, fruit sorting, medical applications, and more.

Unlike CMOS sensors, from which high-quality images are reliably derived under wide operating conditions, SWIR sensors typically need “tuning” relative to temperature and exposure duration. First generation SWIR cameras sometimes generated images that while useful, were a bit rough and with certain limitations in the extreme. SWIR camera manufacturers have been innovating solutions to raise the performance of their cameras.

What’s the problem?
In short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging applications, camera operation points such as exposure time, gain and bit-depth need to be adapted depending on the inspection task at hand. Image sensor defects such as defective pixels and image non-uniformities – inherent to SWIR sensors – are sensitive to the aforementioned operations points.

Allied Vision has introduced dynamic operating point optimization (DOPO) to further automate SWIR cameras’ capacity to adapt to changes brought about by exposure time, temperature, gain, and bit depth.

A DOPO equipped camera is factory calibrated at up to 600 correction maps, varying each of exposure time, temperature, gain and bit depth across a range of steps, and building maps that represent all the stepwise permutations.

Takeaway: DOPO provides a set of correction tables not just one
So with DOPO providing a set of correction tables, the camera can automatically apply the best-fit correction for whatever operating point is in use. That’s the key point of DOPO. Unlike single-fit correction tables, with so many calibrated corrections under DOPO, the best-fit isn’t far off.

https://zurl.co/JDWGh

Dynamic Operating Point Optimization - Explained! Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) imaging is enjoying double-digit growth rates, thanks to improving technologies and performance, and innovative applications. Unlike visible-light sensors, SWIR cameras can image through silicon, plastics, and other semitransparent materials. That’s really effective for ...