getframes

Documentation: jacotay7.github.io/getframes

Realistic synthetic camera frames for scientific imaging pipelines.

getframes generates the frames a real detector would have produced: the full photon → electron → ADU signal path for CCD, CMOS, EMCCD, eAPD and sCMOS sensors, with auditable noise physics (read noise, dark current, shot noise, fixed-pattern non-uniformity, a unified stochastic gain stage, clock-induced charge, nonlinearity, cosmic rays). It produces dark, bias and flat frames, and renders star fields through a PSF and telescope into a realistic science frame — so you can build and validate image-processing pipelines against ground truth. It runs on NumPy by default and switches to CUDA (via CuPy) with a single argument.

Install

pip install getframes            # CPU (NumPy + SciPy + astropy + aocore)
pip install 'getframes[gpu]'     # + CuPy for CUDA 12.x
pip install -e '.[dev]'          # from a clone, for development

Quickstart

import getframes as gf

cam = gf.Camera.from_preset("andor_ikon_m934")  # 21 presets, or your own CameraConfig
frame = cam.dark_frame(exposure=60.0, temperature=-60.0, seed=0)

frame.data  # (1024, 1024) array of ADU
frame.stats()  # {'mean': ..., 'median': ..., 'std': ..., 'min': ..., 'max': ...}
frame.metadata  # camera/exposure/temperature provenance

scene = gf.Scene(  # render a sky, then expose it
    shape=(256, 256),
    optics=gf.Telescope(
        aperture_diameter_m=2.5,
        throughput=0.3,
        plate_scale_arcsec_per_pixel=0.4,
        band=gf.Bandpass.johnson("V"),
    ),
    psf=gf.MoffatPSF(fwhm_arcsec=1.1, beta=3.0),
    sources=[gf.PointSource(x=128, y=128, magnitude=20.0)],
    sky=gf.Sky(surface_brightness_mag_arcsec2=21.0),
)
frame = cam.with_config(resolution=(256, 256)).observe(scene, exposure=300.0, seed=0)

import cupy as cp  # and the same path on a GPU

cam = gf.Camera.from_preset("andor_ocam2k", device="gpu", precision="single")
rate = cp.full(cam.resolution, 2.0e6, dtype=cp.float32)  # photons/s/pixel
frame = cam.expose(rate, exposure=1.0e-3, seed=0)  # CuPy ADU, no host copy

See Getting started for the full walkthrough, Observing scenes for sources, PSFs and telescopes, Camera presets for the preset library, and The noise model for the physics behind every stage.

Benchmarks

Warm bulk-frame throughput on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and an NVIDIA RTX 5090 (float32, truth enabled, persistent camera, device-resident input/output, no host transfers). The raw artifact and its invocation are versioned with the benchmarks:

Higher is better; CUDA was synchronized around every timed region and construction was excluded. Even the smallest case reaches about 2×, while larger arrays and gain-stage detectors expose much more parallel work. Reproduce the table with

python benchmarks/bench_devices.py --seconds 2 --warmup 10 --device both
python benchmarks/run.py                    # the CPU hot-path sweep

See the full snapshot and the GPU guide for the methodology.

Features

• Five detector families — CCD, CMOS, EMCCD, eAPD and sCMOS, from a library of sourced presets (andor_ikon_m934, andor_ocam2k, leonardo_saphira, first_light_imaging_cred_one, andor_marana_4_2b_11, zwo_asi2600mm, …) or any CameraConfig you define.
• Auditable noise physics — dark current vs. temperature, shot noise, a unified stochastic gain stage (EM and avalanche) with realistic excess noise, clock-induced charge, per-pixel sCMOS read noise, polynomial nonlinearity, saturation and quantisation, each a small documented pure function in the noise model.
• Detector realism — CTI, blooming, IPC, kTC/reset noise, multi-amplifier readout, cosmic-ray tracks, defect and structured-bias maps, vignetting and radial distortion.
• Fixed patterns that behave like silicon — PRNU, DSNU, hot pixels, defects and amplifier structure are keyed on fixed_pattern_seed, so they repeat in every frame and are genuinely removable by a master frame.
• Scenes — point, extended and catalog sources, Gaussian/Moffat/Airy/array PSFs, a Telescope with Vega (Johnson) and AB (ugriz, Gaia, 2MASS) bandpasses, extinction, graybody thermal background, WCS pixel↔world, and light curves.
• Calibration & ground truth — master bias/dark/flat builders and a calibrate reduction that closes the raw → reduced → truth loop.
• Wavefront-sensor cameras — Calibration turns ADU back into input-referred electrons and photons, Camera.effective_read_noise_e gives the input-referred noise, and a guide covers a WFS camera in a closed loop.
• Observations — Observation drives time series with jitter, drift, dither and persistence, carrying per-frame truth.
• Spectral mode (opt-in) — QE curves, relative or absolute SEDs, transmission products and wavelength-resolved exposure; see Spectral mode and Radiometry & the infrared.
• Analysis on real data too — aperture sums, centroids, photon-transfer curves, independent-stack characterization, and reset-aware nondestructive-ramp analysis run on measured detector frames as readily as on simulated ones.
• Scale & datasets — a float32 fast path, vectorised multi-source rendering, a streaming raw+truth dataset generator and a getframes CLI; see Scale & datasets.
• GPU-optional — every camera takes device="gpu", "gpu:N" or "auto" (CuPy) and keeps the detector path and truth arrays device-resident. CPU and GPU have independent RNG streams, so a seed repeats exactly on a fixed backend while parity across backends means matching statistics, not identical pixels.
• Reproducible and typed — all randomness flows through a camera-owned seeded generator, never global state; mypy --strict passes; every public name is frozen under SemVer as of 2.0.
• Validated — noise models are checked against published forms in CI; see Validation.

See the API reference for every public function and class, the runnable examples for PTC, exposure planning, AO limiting magnitude, transit photometry and detector realism, and the roadmap for what is next.

Contributing

Contributions — especially new camera presets — are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Run the checks locally with:

ruff check . && ruff format --check . && mypy && pytest

License

MIT — see LICENSE.