Imaging sensor Modulation Transfer Function estimation

Abstract

The Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is an important quantitative indicator of imaging system resolving power. State of the art MTF measurement approaches utilize known targets and work quite well on pixels of size over 2.0 micron. While efforts have been taken towards reliable MTF measurement of smaller pixels, existing methods suffer from high complexities in measurement and analysis. The proposed approach originates from a linear camera model and decomposes the system to linear blocks and sampling operation. The sensor output signal is modeled as a linear combination of intended and unintended signal (noise plus crosstalk). The crosstalk itself is again modeled via a linear kernel that can be obtained based on data from a designed experiment. The sensor MTF is then estimated by combining the relevant elements together. The results are verified against these from a much more sophisticated setup [1] and show good alignment.