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Saturation (Imaging)

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Synonyms

Clipping

Related Concepts

Radiometric Response Function

Definition

In imaging, saturation is a type of distortion where the recorded image is limited to some maximum value, interfering with the measurement of bright regions of the scene.

Background

The role of a sensor element is to measure incident irradiance and record that quantity as an image intensity value. However, physical constraints limit the maximum irradiance that can be measured for a given camera setting. In the absence of noise, the mapping from irradiance to image intensity is fully described by the radiometric response function, a monotonically increasing function whose range is restricted by the maximum irradiance. Pixels whose intensity corresponds to this maximum are known as saturated.

Saturated pixels contain less information about the scene than other pixels. While non-saturated pixels can be related to the incident irradiance by applying the inverse of the radiometric response function, saturated pixels...

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Hasinoff, S.W. (2014). Saturation (Imaging). In: Ikeuchi, K. (eds) Computer Vision. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-31439-6_483

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