TOYON RESEARCH CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: There are many orders of magnitude light intensity differentiation from a dark room to sun

Description

There are many orders of magnitude light intensity differentiation from a dark room to sunlight. Because standard linear CMOS and CCD image sensors can only offer up to approximately 60 dB of dynamic range, they are prone to saturation or darkness in high contrast scenes. Work in this proposed effort seeks to employ the latest in logarithmic sensors along with state-of-the-art image processing to provide a high contrast, 120 dB dynamic range sensor. While traditional high dynamic range (HDR) sensors offer a dramatic increase in performance over standard detectors, we seek several improvements over existing designs. First, we propose to employ a Photon Focus LINLOG detector that pairs linear low light response with logarithmic high intensity response to provide not only wide 120 dB dynamic light intensity range, but also excellent low-light sensitivity. Second, while HDR sensors do provide excellent dynamic range, this typically comes at the price of reduced contrast. Therefore, the latest in contrast enhancement, equalization, and scaling algorithms will be used to provide the best possible human viewable output. Finally, seeking to maximize integration and provide flexible back-end viewing options, we will employ the latest in Xilinx FPGAs.