CMOS sensors versus CCD’s

The question of whether CMOS-based cameras are suitable for machine vision is one of those debates that can arouse a surprising amount of passion. I’m somewhat agnostic since I’ve found modern CMOS cameras to be good enough. There aren’t many applications where a little noise makes the difference between success and failure, and if you are operating on a knife edge perhaps this means you just haven’t engineered a robust application.

But opinions aside, there’s not much question that CCDs still provide lower noise than do CMOS sensors, and that’s a pity because CMOS cameras can run at much higher frame rates. So, you might be asking, is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

Well according to “CCDs lose ground to new CMOS sensors,” (Laser Focus World, March 1st, 2011,) the gap is certainly closing. This fascinating article, written by a pair of camera gurus from Andor Technology, describes a new “scientific” CMOS sensor that provides both high frame rate and low noise. Currently it’s aimed at molecular biologists rather than machine vision folks, but if it works as well as they claim I would expect to see other camera companies start to pick it up.