Measurement, Characterization, And Modeling Of Noise In Staring Infrared Focal Plane Arrays

Abstract

To fulfill the goal of high performance advanced staring infrared (IR) sensors,. development of low-noise focal plane arrays is critically important. Progress on focal plane array (FPA) development over the past decade has produced the capability to demonstrate midwave IR arrays of moderate size which may satisfy the requirements of some scanning and staring applications. In the vast majority of cases, electronic noise levels, array uniformity and dynamic range are major limiting factors with regard to the ultimate usefulness of the FPA. The purpose of this paper is to describe selected methods for measuring and characterizing spatial and temporal noise in staring FPAs and then to show how these results can be used in simulations and analytic models to predict the performance of selected staring sensors. The emphasis of the paper is on mide-wave IR FPAs for use in the detection and tracking of point sources. Measurement techniques are described generically, including necessary equipment and associated computations. Actual MWIR data from our own measurement program, or industry programs which we are monitoring are used to illustrate the current state-of-the-art. We discuss how the results of spatial and temporal noise measurements can be incorporated into simulations of sensors having staring FPAs. We show how methods for predicting performance of selected staring sensor systems are derived using representative spatial and temporal noise.