Driving at night or through tunnels presents challenges to drivers and to electronic assistance systems. Charge-coupled device (CCD) imagers suffer from white saturation, blooming and no contrast resolution in the dark. Active-pixel CMOS sensors have eliminated blooming, but their sensitivity is worse than that of CCDs. These sensors cannot handle the brightness of modern headlights. Electronic vision assistance has to provide an instantaneous dynamic range of more than 1,000,000:1 within each frame and from frame to frame at rates greater than 300 frames per second. This is the level of performance provided by HDRC sensors and cameras. HDRC sensors are manufactured in standard CMOS technologies suitable for camera-on-chip integration, but the HDRC pixel looks at the world continuously. Digital HDRC cameras are therefore able to detect pedestrians in the vicinity of headlights. For the covering abstract see ITRD E115762.
Samenvatting