<title>Noise modeling for design and simulation of computational imaging systems</title>

Abstract

Understanding signal and noise quantities in any practical computational imaging system is critical. Knowledge of the imaging environment, optical parameters, and detector sensitivity determine the signal quantities but often noise quantities are assumed to be independent of the signal and either uniform or Gaussian additive. These simplistic noise models do not accurately model actual detectors. Accurate noise models are needed in order to design optimal systems. We describe a noise model for a modern APS CMOS detector and a number of noise sources that we will be measuring. A method for characterizing the noise sources given a set of dark images and a set of flat field images is outlined. The noise characterization data is then used to simulate dark images and flat field images. The simulated data is a very good match to the real data thus validating the model and characterization procedure.