Round Trip Imaging

Introduction

With the prevalence of cameras on smartphones, the quality of every-day-use cameras has improved immensely. What was once available only through an expensive camera-only device is now available in your pocket. This prompted me to ask the question, how good does a camera have to be? Sure, the higher the quality the better the result, right? Well let us answer that question with an ISET experiment!

Background

The goal in this computational experiment was to identify how the quality of a camera affects the resulting (output) image of a predetermined image source. The source and output display remained constant while only the camera sensor parameters were varied. The quality of the camera in this study is defined by the camera read noise and the resolution of the camera sensor, specifically pixel height and width.The predetermined image source is an image that was captured using an iPhone 6 camera (1/3-inch sensor, 8 MP) shown below.

Methods