  Vision Systems are quickly becoming a large component of Active Automotive
Safety Systems. In order to be effective in critical safety applications these
systems must produce high quality images in both daytime and night-time
scenarios in order to provide the large informational content required for
software analysis in applications such as lane departure, pedestrian detection
and collision detection. The challenge in capturing high quality images in low
light scenarios is that the signal to noise ratio is greatly reduced, which can
result in noise becoming the dominant factor in a captured image, thereby
making these safety systems less effective at night. Research has been
undertaken to develop a systematic method of characterising image sensor
performance in response to electrical noise in order to improve the design and
performance of automotive cameras in low light scenarios. The root cause of
image row noise has been established and a mathematical algorithm for
determining the magnitude of row noise in an image has been devised. An
automated characterisation method has been developed to allow performance
characterisation in response to a large frequency spectrum of electrical noise
on the image sensor power supply. Various strategies of improving image sensor
performance for low light applications have also been proposed from the
research outcomes.
