Experimental measurement of modulation transfer function of a retina-like sensor

The retina-like sensor is a kind of anthropomorphic visual sensor. It plays an important role in both biological and machine vision due to its advantages of high resolution in the fovea, a wide field-of-view, and minimum pixel count. The space-variant property of the sensor makes it difficult to directly measure its modulation transfer function (MTF). The MTF of a retina-like sensor is measured with the bar-target pattern method. According to the pixel arrangement, the sensor is divided into rings and the MTF of each ring is measured using spoke targets with different periods. Comparison between the measured MTF and the theoretical MTF of the sensor showed that they coincide. The differences between them are also analyzed and discussed. The measured MTF helps to analyze the performance of an imaging system containing a retina-like sensor. (C) 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)