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New Kodak Sensors See Well in Dark
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"It's the de facto standard in the industry," DeLuca says of Bayer. Half of the pixels on the sensor collect green light, while the remaining pixels collect red and blue light; software later reconstructs the a full-color signal for each pixel.
Enter Kodak's new high-sensitivity image sensor.
"We're introducing a fourth pixel in addition to red, green, and blue," DeLuca says. "This one is clear--panchromatic--so all wavelengths of light go through and are detected by the pixel. Those panchromatic pixels are more sensitive, because they do not filter out any light [striking the sensor]. We can then use those panchromatic pixels to increase the sensitivity of the sensor, and use the color pixels to collect the color information that ends up in the final image."
Currently, a color filter rests near the top of a pixel. "Light would come from above, and then go through this color filter to go out, so only the red light or blue light or green light passes," DeLuca says. "And then the remaining light is detected by the pixel structure."
But Kodak is changing the filter. From a manufacturing perspective, it's not a dramatic fix. "All we need to do is to change the configuration in that color filter layer, leaving the rest of the pixel unchanged," DeLuca says.
Kodak's new image sensor technology has a software component as well. The high-sensitivity sensor, with its new approach to patterns, requires revised software algorithms to generate a full color image from the raw information coming off the sensor.
"There's additional work that needs to happen to integrate the new algorithms--which will continue to be developed--into the camera," DeLuca says. "We're not changing the fundamental structure of the silicon, which gives us the opportunity to deploy this broadly. This technology has the opportunity to become a new standard."
Kodak has applied for more than a dozen patents in this space, tied specifically to the high-sensitivity sensor technology. DeLuca says the patents include "the concept of using panchromatic pixels plus red, blue, and green to make a full color image; the specific patterns of red, blue, and green pixels; and software algorithms and techniques for processing the data."
