5.5 Dual-Tap Pipelined-Code-Memory Coded-Exposure-Pixel CMOS Image Sensor for Multi-Exposure Single-Frame Computational Imaging

Abstract

Modern computational photography applications such as 3D sensing, gesture analysis, and robotic navigation drive the growing need for programmability, or coding, of the camera exposure at the individual-pixel level. Unlike conventional cameras, which record all light incident onto a pixel, the emerging class of coded-exposure-pixel (CEP) cameras can be programmed to selectively detect only some of that light [1] or, better, sort all of the light [2, 3], depending on the pixel code. In conjunction with a concurrently coded illumination, this enables a wide range of new coded multi-exposure single-readout-frame imaging capabilities at video rates. This work demonstrates such an image sensor where multiple pixel-wise-coded exposures, or subframes, are accumulated during one video frame.