Opto-Electronic Sensor Systems for Digital Image Processing

Image processing may be regarded as a chain of information transmitting and manipulating elements. And within this chain the image sensor system is the second element, just behind the image forming lens and in front of the image storing device. In practice these image sensors are opto-electronic transducers which are exposed to an electro magnetic intensity distribution, and give an electronic signal proportional to this intensity. In most cases the incident radiation is restricted to ‘light’, i.e. the visible and near infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The position of the sensor within the information proecessing chain shows, that there must be proper matching onto the other elements: the imaging objective and the image storing device.