OPTICAL PRODUCT
SCIENTIFIC HIGH-SPEED CAMERAS
SCIENTIFIC HIGH-SPEED CAMERAS: APPLICATIONS & TECHNIQUES
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Kyle D. GILROY AMETEK- PHANTOM Vision Research, 100 Dey Road Wayne, New Jersey 07470, USA * kyle. gilroy @ ametek. com
https:// doi. org / 10.1051 / photon / 202513172
This article discusses the progression of high-speed cameras, along with some of the key working principles, key definitions, the means by which high-speed CMOS sensors are characterized, and the wide diversity of applications and techniques high-speed cameras are used within.
Image © Phred Petersen, RMIT, Phil Taylor, Vision Research
High-speed cameras have become a cornerstone of modern research and development, serving as key scientific components that have been enabling scientists, engineers, and technicians to both visualize and measure highspeed phenomena. Much like how a microscope provides the ability to finely divide space for human visual inspection, a high-speed camera acts as a " time microscope " allowing researchers to leaf through ultrashort slices of time that occur on timescales otherwise imperceptible to the human eye & mind. In this article, we will discuss the current state of commercial high-speed scientific cameras, together with the basic working principles & emerging features, and then highlight some of the new and exciting high-speed applications.
Figure 1: Schematic illustration of the conversion of incident photons to a resulting pixel value.
PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION There are a range of different types of high-speed cameras, with the most common type( and the focus of this article) utilizing complementary metal-oxide semiconductor( CMOS) sensors. CMOS sensors consist of an array of photodiodes that convert incident photons into electrical charges, with each photodiode unit corresponding to a‘ pixel’ in a resulting image. When photons are absorbed by the pixel, a proportional charge is generated and then highly parallelized A / D converters subsequently convert the charges to digital data, as either 8, 10 or 12-bits( typical for high-speed cameras), an abbreviated workflow is shown in Figure 1. To capture color images, a Bayer filter array is placed over the sensor, allowing pixels to capture only either red, green, or blue light; and the color information is reconstructed through interpolation. Once digitized, the image data
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