Inside the Elphel open source camera

LinuxDevices has published a paper that goes deep into into the open source (hardware and software) Elphel cameras:

Foreword: — This paper describes the recent imaging advances by Elphel, supplier of open source (hardware and software) cameras to customers that include Google (for select Street View and book scanning projects). It should interest imaging engineers, fans of open source, and those curious about open source hardware.

The paper was written by Dr. Andrey Filippov, the Russian physicist who founded Elphel in 2001. Filippov has contributed many papers to LinuxDevices through the years, as regular readers will be aware.

… Filippov includes a fairly mind-boggling description of the image compression algorithms used in Elphel cameras. He provides instructions for calculating the number of electrons each of your camera sensor’s pixels can hold before welling over, and then provides a javascript calculator to use that “full well capacity” FWC figure, along with several other specifications, to determine the effective bit depth of your sensor…

Elphel camera under the hood: from Verilog to PHP