Adaptive bias voltage driving technique of uncooled infrared focal plane array

Abstract

In order to have the ability of detecting the infrared scene with different temperature range, the bias voltage of uncooled infrared focal plane array (IRFPA) is usually fixed. While, under this condition two situations may occur. One is that the dynamic range of the scene is far bigger than IRFPA, and then the response of IRFPA is not the real scene gray. The response of IRFPA at some scene temperature may be cut off. The other is that the dynamic range of the scene is far smaller than IRFPA, and then most response dynamic range is wasted which reduces the ability of distinguishing details. In order to solve this problem, we brought forward the adaptive bias voltage driving technique of uncooled IRFPA in this manuscript. We computed the real scene temperature range according to the response of IRFPA and current bias voltage, set the adjustable threshold of bias voltage and computed the matching bias voltage. Adopting the technique, we can guarantee that the response dynamic range is accordant with the real scene continuously. The theory derivation and experiment demonstrate that the technique is effective in making the scene temperature dynamic rang and response dynamic range of IRFPA be consistent. And the technique can increase the IR image detai1 resolution by a big margin.