Ah, so you are saying the quantanization noise can't be averaged out, as with decimation after an ADC.
Re:Understanding Image Sharpness (2003)
by dreamcompiler on Monday May 21, 2018 @01:45PM
(#17120222)
It could, but you'd have to start with a sensor that had both a high number of bits per sample and super-high spatial frequency. If you had such a sensor, there would be no point in decimating; you'd just use the samples the sensor gave you directly. The point with decimating is to sacrifice some spatial resolution for an increase in bits-per-sample from a low-bps (but high-frequency) sensor. This is done routinely for audio signals but it would be a lot more tricky with a two-dimensional signal. Not impossible, but it would require processing elements between the pixels to diffuse the error properly without losing information.
To perform this tradeoff and capture e.g 1-bit images with super-high resolution you'd need the sensor to do error diffusion a la sigma-delta modulation, and AFAIK image sensors cannot currently do this.