Flow diagram of the transformation of a matrix of counts, from the original matrix drawn from the observations of a process of mean λ_T to the reported matrix, used in this study. In this example, the count matrix is 2-dimensional, the background reduction level is r = 2 and the binning level is set to 2 along both dimensions, giving B = 4. There are four intermediate steps: (1) is the binned observation of the original count matrix from which we want to estimate the mean number of counts per bin λ_T . (2) is the application of the background reduction. The resulting matrix is the actual data product transmitted from spacecraft to ground. (3) is the application of the background-reduction correction, defined as: c + r if c ≠ 0, 0 otherwise, with c the number of counts. (4) is the uniform unbinning. It is clear the unbinning may result in fractional values, which cannot be treated as Poisson counts.