Increasing dynamic range of digital pixels by utilizing polling during integration

摘要

Digital circuitry is provided that periodically reads at least one bit of digital counters associated with pixels of an image sensor. When the read bit(s) of a particular digital counter decrease between subsequent reads, then the digital circuitry increments an overflow counter associated with the particular digital counter. The value of each of the overflow counters of the digital circuitry are used with the corresponding values of the digital counters to generate pixel values for a frame (also referred to as an image).