Canon’s new HDR camera sensor can capture multiple exposures in just one shot


For now, there’s really only one way to capture an HDR image when lighting conditions vary wildly across the frame: You take multiple shots with different exposures, and then separate the properly exposed areas from the different images. Let’s assemble a final composite using . But it may be out soon, with a new Canon sensor allowing multiple exposure settings in different areas of the sensor.

The cameras in most modern smartphones now fully automate the process of creating a high dynamic rangeor HDRimage, quickly capturing a series of images with just a single shutter press, and then automatically combining them into the final picture. Use intelligent image processing to seamlessly merge. Where everything in the shot appears properly exposed. Even digital cameras can automate this to some degree through exposure bracketing and automated software in post-production.

Capturing HDR images in this way requires fairly controlled conditions, including a subject that doesn’t move between multiple exposures, and some decent processing to automatically churn out composites after the fact. power. Canon’s new sensor removes all of those limitations.

Instead of capturing a series of images with varying exposures, the new 12.6MP (4,152 x 3,024), one-inch, back-illuminated stacked CMOS sensor is divided into 736 smaller areas, which fill a smaller area of the larger frame. Can capture part. a different exposure. The way camera sensors work now, exposure is a global setting for every pixel, but here different areas of the sensor can be adjusted for lack or abundance of light.


Two images of a car leaving a parking garage taken by a camera with a conventional sensor compared to an image of a car captured by Canon's new image sensor.

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Canon initially developed this sensor for use in more industrial applications such as security cameras, but this helps illustrate the usefulness of this new approach. Photographing a car halfway out of a parking lot poses a great challenge, as the front half of the vehicle is lit by bright sunlight while the rear half of the vehicle is still bathed in shadow.

Trying to capture an image using conventional camera technology that properly exposes the entire vehicle, including a legible license plate and a visible driver, is impossible without multiple exposures. But Canon’s new sensor works alongside a dedicated image processing CPU to simultaneously calculate and set exposure for all 736 areas on the sensor, producing an image where all parts of the car are properly exposed . The system works fast enough to capture video at up to 60 frames per second.

The other advantage of a sensor that can handle multiple exposures at once is that it greatly reduces the amount of data it needs to process, so it is potentially more cost-effective when it comes to its back-end hardware needs. Again, an advantage that primarily benefits industrial uses of this technology, but it is not difficult to image a sensor like this, eventually finding its way into consumer devices, taking over the camera’s auto-exposure functionality. Has been and is making it completely idiot-proof.

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