Author Affiliations
Abstract
1 Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan 430074, P. R. China
2 Key Laboratory of Biomedical Photonics of Ministry of Education Department of Biomedical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan 430074, P. R. China
Low-light camera is an indispensable component in various fluorescence microscopy techniques. However, choosing an appropriate low-light camera for a specific technique (for example, single molecule imaging) is always time-consuming and sometimes confusing, especially after the commercialization of a new type of camera called sCMOS camera, which is now receiving heavy demands and high praise from both academic and industrial users. In this tutorial, we try to provide a guide on how to fully access the performance of low-light cameras using a well-developed method called photon transfer curve (PTC). We first present a brief explanation on the key parameters for characterizing low-light cameras, then explain the experimental procedures on how to measure PTC. We also show the application of the PTC method in experimentally quantifying the performance of two representative low-light cameras. Finally, we extend the PTC method to provide offset map, read noise map, and gain map of individual pixels inside a camera.
Photon transfer curve EMCCD sCMOS SNR Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences
2016, 9(3): 1630008