Design and analysis of filter-based optical systems for spectral responsivity estimation of digital video cameras

For estimating spectral responsivities of digital video cameras, a filter-based optical system is designed with sophisticated filter selections, in this paper. The filter consideration in the presence of noise is central to the optical systems design, since the spectral filters primarily prescribe the structure of the perturbed system. A theoretical basis is presented to confirm that sophisticated filter selections can make this system as insensitive to noise as possible. Also, we propose a filter selection method based on the orthogonal-triangular (QR) decomposition with column pivoting (QRCP). To investigate the noise effects, we assess the estimation errors between the actual and estimated spectral responsivities, with the different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels of an eight-bit/channel camera. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method yields satisfactory estimation accuracy. That is, the filter-based optical system with the spectral filters selected from the QRCP-based method is much less sensitive to noise than those with other filters from different selections.