A high-resolution image acquisition method with defect-pixel recovery for solid-state image sensors

For super-high-resolution image acquisition beyond HDTV, a CMOS image sensor is the most promising. At present, a CMOS image sensor with spatial resolution of 3K×4K and temporal resolution of 30 fps is being developed. The serious problem in fabricating such a super-high-resolution CMOS image sensor is a tremendously low yield rate, which is caused by occurrence of defect pixels. If defect pixels are recovered by some post-processing, we can improve the yield rate dramatically. From this point of view, we propose a new high-resolution image acquisition method which makes it possible to utilize a CMOS image sensor having many defect pixels. Our method deliberately takes a defocused image using an image sensor having defect pixels, applies a certain image recovery algorithm to it, and thus produces its focused and repaired version. We study the frequency response of our method using one-dimensionally sinusoidally changing chart images, and perform some experimental simulations on real images