6 Image sensors

The digital image sensor is considered in many ways the ‘heart’ of an image capture device. These silicon chips are about the size of a fingernail and contain millions of photosensitive elements called photosites. They convert light imaged through the camera lens into electrical signals which are then processed to form a two-dimensional image representing the scene being captured. In this chapter the operation of a digital image sensor will be described. You will learn how photons striking a sensor are converted to electric charge. A photon is a single packet of energy that defines light. To capture an image, millions of tiny photosites are combined into a two-dimensional array, each of which transforms the light from one point ...

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