Instructor: Norman Koren, Imatest, LLC
Level: Intermediate
Prerequisites: General knowledge of photography: shutter speed, f-stops, sensitivity, and some familiarity with testing camera quality.

Benefits:
This course enables the attendee to:

• Understand the fundamentals of information capacity and how it relates to conventional SFR and noise measurements.
• Understand information metrics (information capacity and others derived from information theory), and have a feeling of how it relates to system performance.
• Learn about the latest work being done to correlate information metrics with system performance.
• Learn the fundamentals of system simulation, including preparing the image (typically a test chart), determining the lens degradations and image sensor noise model.
• Know how to determine the effects of each system component or image processing step on system performance.

Course Description:
This course introduces the basics of information theory, shows why the key information metrics (information capacity and SNRi) are superior to traditional metrics such as sharpness (SFR) and noise for characterizing camera performance, then shows how to calculate them from test chart images.

Next, the instructor describes the camera performance simulator, including:

• Creating input images (usually test targets)
• Simulating lens degradations
• Simulating lens degradations
• The image sensor noise model
• Image signal processing (ISP)
• Results, including the standard and new information metrics

This course will discuss C4, the information capacity measured directly from ISO 12233-compliant 4:1 contrast slanted edges, and show how it characterizes performance over a range of illumination. Finally, it includes a discussion of work to correlate information metrics with machine vision performance.

Intended Audience: Engineers who are tasked with designing camera systems for a variety of applications, often in the automotive and medical industries. They typically have degrees in sciences such as physics or in electrical or mechanical engineering, but may not be well-versed in image science. Ideally, they should have some experience in imaging system design, though the course will accommodate beginners with limited engineering experience.

Norman Koren became interested in photography while growing up near the George Eastman House photographic museum in Rochester, NY. He received his BA in physics from Brown University (1965) and his masters in physics from Wayne State University (1969), then worked in the computer storage industry simulating digital magnetic recording systems and channels for disk and tape drives from 1967-2001. He founded Imatest LLC in 2003 to develop software and test charts to measure the quality of digital imaging systems.