Determining the absorption tolerance of single chromophore photodiodes for machine vision

Color information is much less useful to machine vision systems than to people because the spectrum of light illuminating a scene is unknown. For scenes illuminated by daylight, color information can be made significantly more useful to machine vision systems if the scene is imaged using sensors with a specifically chosen combination of spectral responses. In this paper we show that detectors with a full width at half maximum of up to 100 nm can give good color discrimination, and that conjugated dendrimer chromophores have the spectral properties required to allow machine vision systems to confidently use color information. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3456374]