An overview of the important techniques for detection of optical radiation from the ultraviolet, through visible to infrared spectral regions is presented. At the beginning single-point devices are considered. Next, di.erent application circuits used in direct detection systems together with elucidation of the design of front-end circuits and discussion of their performance are presented. Third part of the paper is devoted to advanced techniques including coherent detection. Finally, the updated information devoted to readout of signals from detector arrays and focal plane arrays is included. It is shown that detector focal plane technology has revolutionized many kinds of imaging in the past 25 years.
Non−uniformity noise, it was, it is, and it will probably be one of the most non−desired attached companion of the infrared focal plane array (IRFPA) data. We present a higher order filter where the key advantage is based in its capacity to estimates the detection parameters and thus to compensate it for fixed pattern noise, as an enhancement of Constant Statistics (CS) theory. This paper shows a technique to improve the convergence in accelerated way for CS (AACS: Acceleration Algorithm for Constant Statistics). The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by using simulated infrared video sequences and several real infrared video sequences obtained using two infrared cameras
Infrared thermal imaging, using cooled and uncooled detectors, is continuously gaining attention because of its wide military and civilian applications. Futuristic requirements of high temperature operation, multispectral imaging, lower cost, higher resolution (using pixels) etc. are driving continuous developments in the field. Although there are good reviews in the literature by Rogalski [1–4], Martyniuk et al. [5] and Rogalski et al. [6] on various types of infrared detectors and technologies, this paper focuses on some of the important recent trends and diverse applications in this field and discusses some important fundamentals of these detectors.