An automatic performance test and evaluation system for IRFPA

With the development of the infrared detection and imaging technologies, the infrared detection systems have played an important role in applications including military and civilian, which makes the requirements for the performance of infrared detectors increasingly high.However, due to the temperature drift, thermal shock and other factors, blind pixels and noise may change, which will greatly affect the imaging quality of the system, so it is necessary to accurately test and evaluate the relevant performance parameters of the infrared detection system such as the number and distribution of blind pixels and flickering pixels. But there are still lack of effective and accurate long-term test methods for these parameters, and the existing test methods have problems in automation, accuracy and precision. In view of the problems above, this research builds an automatic performance test and evaluation system for the infrared detectors, and additionally, except for response rate, noise, dynamic range, noise equivalent temperature difference and blind pixel, a special characterization of flickering pixel for the infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPA) is given in detail. Accordingly, experiment results based on two 512 x 512 IRFPAs demonstrate that the established system could automatically measure and assess the performance of the detector accurately, and meanwhile, the number variation and the spatial distribution of blind pixels and flickering pixels could be performed elaborately. This study can be used as a reference for the performance test and analysis of infrared detection system.