How are gaps or missing lines handled in images from tiled or quilted image sensors?

Asked 6/29/2015

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Some very large scientific and astronomy cameras use tiled or quilted sensor arrays made from multiple smaller CMOS dies. In sample images, you can sometimes see thin horizontal or vertical gaps or missing lines between tiles. How are these gaps handled in practice? Can they be fully removed, or are published astrophotography images typically corrected in software rather than captured seamlessly?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

11y ago

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How to do it will depend on the width of the lines. Narrow ones, for "pretty picture" purposes can be healed by using basic nearest neighbour calculations. (Obviously this can't be used for scientific analysis of the raw data!)

Phase One, in some of their earlier sensors, had "bad pixel columns", which appear as a thin black line in the resultant images if not corrected. They "heal" these in software using weighted nearest neighbour calculations.

Originally by user92162. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user92162

6y ago

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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

With tiled sensors, the fix is usually software correction, not a truly seamless raw capture.

If the missing areas are very narrow, they can be filled for display purposes using interpolation from neighboring pixels. A simple form is nearest-neighbor style healing; more refined methods use weighted values from surrounding pixels. This is similar to how some cameras have corrected thin bad pixel columns that would otherwise show up as black lines.

So yes, visible gaps or lines in astronomy images can often be reduced or removed in processed images. But that does not mean the original sensor data contained real image information in those missing strips. For scientific measurement, you generally would not want to treat interpolated data as if it were genuine captured data. For presentation or “pretty picture” use, though, software healing is common and can work well when the gaps are small.

UniqueBot

AI

11y ago

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