0000000000326159

AUTHOR

Pierre-jean Lapray

0000-0003-2230-0955

A 1.3 megapixel FPGA-based smart camera for high dynamic range real time video

International audience; A camera is able to capture only a part of a high dynamic range scene information. The same scene can be fully perceived by the human visual system. This is true especially for real scenes where the difference in light intensity between the dark areas and bright areas is high. The imaging technique which can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range). It produces images from a set of multiple LDR images (Low Dynamic Range), captured with different exposure times. This technique appears as one of the most appropriate and a cheap solution to enhance the dynamic range of captured environments. We developed an FPGA-based smart camera that produces a HDR liv…

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Spectral Characterization of a Prototype SFA Camera for Joint Visible and NIR Acquisition

International audience; Multispectral acquisition improves machine vision since it permits capturing more information on object surface properties than color imaging. The concept of spectral filter arrays has been developed recently and allows multispectral single shot acquisition with a compact camera design. Due to filter manufacturing difficulties, there was, up to recently, no system available for a large span of spectrum, i.e., visible and Near Infra-Red acquisition. This article presents the achievement of a prototype of camera that captures seven visible and one near infra-red bands on the same sensor chip. A calibration is proposed to characterize the sensor, and images are captured…

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Multispectral filter arrays: Recent advances and practical implementation

Thanks to some technical progress in interferencefilter design based on different technologies, we can finally successfully implement the concept of multispectral filter array-based sensors. This article provides the relevant state-of-the-art for multispectral imaging systems and presents the characteristics of the elements of our multispectral sensor as a case study. The spectral characteristics are based on two different spatial arrangements that distribute eight different bandpass filters in the visible and near-infrared area of the spectrum. We demonstrate that the system is viable and evaluate its performance through sensor spectral simulation. Multispectral filter arrays: Recent advan…

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HDR Imaging Pipeline for Spectral Filter Array Cameras

Multispectral single shot imaging systems can benefit computer vision applications in needs of a compact and affordable imaging system. Spectral filter arrays technology meets the requirement, but can lead to artifacts due to inhomogeneous intensity levels between spectral channels due to filter manufacturing constraints, illumination and object properties. One solution to solve this problem is to use high dynamic range imaging techniques on these sensors. We define a spectral imaging pipeline that incorporates high dynamic range, demosaicing and color image visualization. Qualitative evaluation is based on real images captured with a prototype of spectral filter array sensor in the visible…

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High Dynamic Range Real-time Vision System for Robotic Applications

International audience; Robotics applications often requires vision systems capable of capturing a large amount of information related to a scene. With many camera sensors, the perception of information is limited in areas with strong contrasts. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) vision system can deal with these limitations. This paper describes the HDR-ARtiSt hardware platform (High Dynamic Range Advanced Real-time imaging System), a FPGA-based architecture that can produce a real- time high dynamic range video from successive image acquisition.

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HDR-ARtiSt: High Dynamic Range Advanced Real-Time Imaging System

International audience; This paper describes the HDR-ARtiSt hardware platform, a FPGA-based architecture that can produce a real- time high dynamic range video from successive image acquisition. The hardware platform is built around a standard low dynamic range (LDR) CMOS sensor and a Virtex 5 FPGA board. The CMOS sensor is a EV76C560 provided by e2v. This 1.3 Megapixel device offers novel pixel integration/readout modes and em- bedded image pre-processing capabilities including multiframe acquisition with various exposure times. Our approach consists of a hardware architecture with different algorithms: double exposure control during image capture, building of an HDR image by combining the…

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HDR-ARtiSt : une caméra intelligente dédiée à la vidéo à grande dynamique en temps réel

International audience; Une caméra vidéo standard n'est capable de capturer qu'une partie de l'information contenue dans une scène de gamme dynamique élevée. La même scène peut être presque entièrement perçue par le système visuel humain. Cela est particulièrement vrai pour les scènes réelles où la différence d'intensité lumineuse entre les zones sombres et les zones claires est élevée. La technique d'imagerie qui peut surmonter ce problème est appelé HDRi (High Dynamic Range imaging). Elle produit des images à partir d'un ensemble de plusieurs images LDRs (Low Dynamic Range), capturées avec différents temps d'exposition. Cette technique apparaît comme l'une des solutions la plus appropriée…

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Nouvelle génération de systèmes de vision temps réel à grande dynamique

This thesis is a part of the EUREKA European project called "High Dynamic Range - Low NoiseCMOS imagers", which developped new approaches to design high performance CMOS sensors.The purpose of this thesis is to design a real-time high dynamic range (HDR) vision system. Themain focus will be the real-time video reconstruction at 60 frames/sec in an embedded architecture.Most of the sensors produce a digital image that is not able to reproduce the real world light inten-sities. Similarly, monitors, printers and current displays do not recover of a wide tonal range. Theapproach proposed in this thesis is multiple acquisitions, taken with different exposure times, to over-come the limitations o…

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High Dynamic Range Spectral Imaging Pipeline For Multispectral Filter Array Cameras

Spectral filter arrays imaging exhibits a strong similarity with color filter arrays. This permits us to embed this technology in practical vision systems with little adaptation of the existing solutions. In this communication, we define an imaging pipeline that permits high dynamic range (HDR)-spectral imaging, which is extended from color filter arrays. We propose an implementation of this pipeline on a prototype sensor and evaluate the quality of our implementation results on real data with objective metrics and visual examples. We demonstrate that we reduce noise, and, in particular we solve the problem of noise generated by the lack of energy balance. Data are provided to the community…

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Overview of ghost correction for HDR video stream generation

International audience; Most digital cameras use low dynamic range image sensors, these LDR sensors can capture only a limited luminance dynamic range of the scene[1], to about two orders of magnitude (about 256 to 1024 levels). However, the dynamic range of real-world scenes varies over several orders of magnitude (10.000 levels). To overcome this limitation, several methods exist for creating high dynamic range (HDR) image (expensive method uses dedicated HDR image sensor and low-cost solutions using a conventional LDR image sensor). Large number of low-cost solutions applies a temporal exposure bracketing. The HDR image may be constructed with a HDR standard method (an additional step ca…

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HDR-­ARtiSt: a FPGA-­based Smart Camera for High Dynamic Range color video from multiple exposures

International audience; A camera is able to capture only a part of a high dynamic range scene information. The same scene can be fully perceived by the human visual system. This is true especially for real scenes where the difference in light intensity between the dark areas and bright areas is high. The imaging technique which can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range). It produces images from a set of multiple LDR images (Low Dynamic Range), captured with different exposure times. This technique appears as one of the most appropriate and a cheap solution to enhance the dynamic range of captured environments. We developed an FPGA-based smart camera that produces a HDR liv…

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HDR-ARtiSt: A 1280x1024-pixel Adaptive Real-time Smart camera for High Dynamic Range video

International audience; Standard cameras capture only a fraction of the information that is visible to the human visual system. This is specifically true for natural scenes including areas of low and high illumination due to transitions between sunlit and shaded areas. When capturing such a scene, many cameras are unable to store the full Dynamic Range (DR) resulting in low quality video where details are concealed in shadows or washed out by sunlight.The imaging technique that can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. This paper describes a complete smart camera built around a standard off-the-shelf LDR (Low Dynamic Range) sensor and a Virtex 6 FPGA board. This …

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A smart camera for High Dynamic Range imaging

International audience; A camera or a video camera is able to capture only a part of a high dynamic range scene information. The same scene can be almost totally perceived by the human visual system. This is true especially for real scenes where the difference in light intensity between the dark areas and bright areas is high. The imaging technique which can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range). It produces images from a set of multiple LDR images (Low Dynamic Range), captured with different exposure times. This technique appears as one of the most appropriate and a cheap solution to enhance the dynamic range of captured environments. We developed an FPGA-based smart cam…

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A Database of Spectral Filter Array Images that Combine Visible and NIR

International audience; Spectral filter array emerges as a multispectral imaging technology, which could benefit several applications. Although several instantiations are prototyped and commercialized, there are yet only a few raw data available that could serve research and help to evaluate and design adequate related image processing and algorithms. This document presents a freely available spectral filter array database of images that combine visible and near infra-red information.

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Smart camera design for realtime High Dynamic Range imaging

International audience; Many camera sensors suffer from limited dynamic range. The result is that there is a lack of clear details in displayed images and videos. This paper describes our approach to generate high dynamic range (HDR) from an image sequence while modifying exposure times for each new frame. For this purpose, we propose an FPGA-based architecture that can produce a real-time high dynamic range video from successive image acquisition. Our hardware platform is build around a standard low dynamic range CMOS sensor and a Virtex 5 FPGA board. The CMOS sensor is a EV76C560 provided by e2v. This 1.3 Megapixel device offers novel pixel integration/readout modes and embedded image pre…

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