Customer Reviews

Image Sensors and Signal Processing for Digital Still Cameras (Optical Science and Engineering)

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Digital signal processing has been around for a long time. Only since 1995 however has the price/performance ratio of sensors and processors been good enough to allow extremely sophisticated devices using DSP to become consumer items.

In 1995 the first really popular digital camera, the Casio QV-10 entered the market and became a great success. Since then, the technology has grown at a phenomenal rate driven by the huge volumes of cameras being sold. This advance shows no sign of slowing down.

This book is on the basic foundations of digital still cameras, the image sensor and the techniques used in processing the image coming from the sensor. It includes both the theory and the concepts of both the hardware being used and the software that ties everything together to make a useful system.

This field is one that is rapidly changing. As a result Dr. Nakamura has gotten a group of people from various companies to write chapters on their own area of expertise. The companies by whom these contributors are employed is a who's who of the digital camera field including: Konica Minolta, Canon, Olympus, Fuji and various specialized companies that work in this area. Dr. Nakamura is employed by Micron, a major semi-conductor company.

This is not a book on how to take pictures, this is a book on what happens underneath when you press the button. It is highly technical, designed for engineers.

This is an excellent book. It covers a wide range of topics in a very detailed manner, suitable for university level students and professionals.

So far I have found only one error in the book. There is something terribly wrong in paragraph 2.2.2, page 32. It is stated that "Depth of the field - ... - is proportional to the square of the focal length of the imaging optics." In fact, the depth of field is inversely proportional to the focal length. Then Eq. 2.11 on page 33 is described once as giving a hyperfocal distance (above the equation) and below the equation is described as giving the depth of the field. I think this part seems to be missing some lines.

Overall, I highly recommend this book if you are looking for something at a technically advanced level.

Junichi Nakamura did a great job in assembling these chapters by a number of knowledgeable authors on most aspects of state-of-the-art CMOS and CCD imager design. I've only read more carefully the chapters on optics and CMOS pixel design, but I found them both very well written and inclusive of recent advances and challenges. The book also includes appendices on background material, e.g. photometry. From someone who worked on imagers in Silicon Valley, I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to see inside contemporary imager design.

I have reviewed quite a few books on cameras and image sensors. Being in the business, I have quite a large library of books related to this field. However, Nakamura nailed it all with this book. A very well written - almost in layman's terms - that addresses all the technical components that make up a camera. If you are looking to understand the principles of a digital camera, this book is for you.

I read many parts of this book and I think that
it was well written for a wide range of users from optics to image quality metrics.

I strongly recommend it to all graduate students/engineers in CMOS imaging.

I wish I got it during my grad studies....but it is never late to learn and enjoy!!! :-)

I give 10 stars to this book...Good luck and hope to see more like this.

Note: I hope to see the optics chapter be re-written and posted with corrections on the Web. I believe this should be done soon and mentioned in amazon.com. Thank you.

The optics chapter (2) is pretty lousy. The part for sensors are just excellent. I found it systematically reviewed I've been reading fragmently from here and there for the past few months. My life would have been much better if I got this book earlier!!

This book focuses on image acquisition and signal processing in digital still cameras (DSC's). From the perspective of the flow of image information, a DSC consists of imaging optics, an image sensor, and a signal processing block that receives a signal from the image sensor and generates digital data that is eventually compressed andstored on a memory device in the DSC.

Chapters one and two are at a rather high level and introductory. However, in chapter 3 the book gets much more specific. Chapter 3 discusses the functions and performance parameters common to CCD and CMOS image sensors. Chapter 4 describes in detail the CCD image sensors widely used in imaging applications. The chapter ranges from a discussion of basic CCD operating principles to descriptions of CCDimage sensors specifically designed for DSC applications. Chapter 5 discusses CMOS image sensor technology. Chapter 6, the final chapter focusing on sensors, describes methods for evaluating image sensor performances relative to DSC requirements.

Chapter 7 shifts gears and begins the discussing of image processing algorithms. The discussion begins with color theory and its application to DSCs. Chapter 8 presents the algorithms utilized by DSC's in both hardware and software. Basic image processing and camera control algorithms are shown along with some image processing examples. Chapter 9 discusses the performance parameters for DSCs and digital video cameras followed by descriptions of the architectures of signal processing engines. Examples of the analog front-end and the digital back-end designs are introduced. Chapter 10 shows how each component previously described affects image quality. The final chapter discusses future DSC image sensors and explores a new paradigm for image sensors.

The reader should have an electrical engineering background since there are quite a few circuit diagrams shown involving transistors, and it is hard to follow the discussion if you are not already aware of their theory of operation. It is a very good book for its target audience, but students with pure computer science backgrounds who are coming to this looking for just the mathematics or algorithms of image processing may found themselves lost in the discussions involving pn junctions, which are numerous.