<title>Fill factor of FPA: effect on image registration and tracking</title>

Abstract

Recent progress on the development of 2D staring Focal Plane Array (FPA) sensors has opened up numerous applications ranging from military to commercial. Staring FPA sensors, particularly Infra-Red FPAs, have certain limitations such as non-uniformity, cross-talk and fill-factor. Sensitivity performance of FPAs to these parameters is important particularly for image registration and tracking applications. Each detector in FPA has an active area and dead space around it. The ratio of the active area to the total detector area is called the fill-factor. The dead space around the active detector surface contributes to the loss of information, which in turn can lead to poor performance of the FPA. In this paper, the effect of fill- factor on the performance of the correlation based registration and tracking algorithms is presented. Assuming an input scene, a sampled image output from a FPA is modeled based on a given fill-factor. Sequences of output images resulting from different fill-factors are used for simulation for evaluating the image registration and tracking performance. It is observed that a poor fill-factor results in deteriorated performance.