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Lecture 21: Image Sensors (76)
chrisamez

If the scene was uniform, why would the photon distribution not be uniform. What is the reason for this?

pgujjula

@chrisamez I'm guessing photons are modeled as individual particles that hitting a sensor according to a random process. Given enough light, the number of photons hitting the sensors should all be very close to the mean and not result in much visible noise. I think there might be more variance and noise due to this effect in low light scenarios?

letrangg

The poisson distribution is used to model discrete events that take place in a chunk of time (e.g, the number of cars passed by a location at a certain time). I guess that's why it's used to model photons arriving during a particular exposure at a particular pixel, even if the scene is completely uniform.

pgujjula

I'm having trouble actually finding a good image demonstrating the effect of high vs low photon shot noise. Is this actually a problem that matters in practice?

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