Turn a Silicon Camera Into an InGaAs Camera

Feifan Lv, Yinqiang Zheng, Bohan Zhang, Feng Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 5987-5995

Short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging has a wide range of applications for both industry and civilian. However, the InGaAs sensors commonly used for SWIR imaging suffer from a variety of drawbacks, including high price, low resolution, unstable quality, and so on. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for SWIR imaging using a common Silicon sensor, which has cheaper price, higher resolution and better technical maturity compared with the specialized InGaAs sensor. Our key idea is to approximate the response of the InGaAs sensor by exploiting the largely ignored sensitivity of a Silicon sensor, weak as it is, in the SWIR range. To this end, we build a multi-channel optical system to collect a new SWIR dataset and present a physically meaningful three-stage image processing algorithm on the basis of CNN. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments show promising experimental results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.