Extraction of Disparity Information Using Pixels with Integrated Apertures

In this paper, extraction of disparity information using pixels with integrated apertures is presented. In general, the aperture of a camera is located over the camera lens. However, we propose the integration of apertures on the pixels of a CMOS image sensor. The integrated apertures are designed and fabricated using a metal layer of the CMOS image sensor process and the parameters including width and offset of the integrated apertures are optimized through optical simulation. The offset of the integrated aperture is defined as the distance between the center of the pixel and the center of the integrated aperture in a unit pixel. The optical simulation is based on a finite-difference time-domain method. Based on the optical simulation, the proposed image sensor with integrated apertures was fabricated using the CMOS image sensor process. The disparity information of the images is extracted using the fabricated image sensor and the performance of this sensor is evaluated through experiments.