Patent ID: 11470286

Abstract:
A high sensitivity image sensor with panchromatic and color pixels arranged to enable high sensitivity, efficient binning and minimize aliasing is disclosed. Efficient binning is enabled by composing the color filter array of tiles containing pixels of at most two types, one panchromatic and the other colored, so that like color pixels to be binned are adjacent to each other. Aliasing is minimized by the twin methods of evenly spacing out tiles containing pixels of like color over the image sensor, and optimizing the arrangement of panchromatic and color pixels within each tile if the tile contains both panchromatic and colored pixels. An image sensor with these color filter arrays can be used to realize cameras with high sensitivity and a plurality of resolutions, with the lower resolutions consuming less power, while minimizing alias artifacts in each supported resolution. A variant of this image sensor with both infrared and color pixels is also disclosed.