No shutter required

Since the dawn of focal plane array (FPA) based thermal imaging, shutterless operation has been considered the holy grail of the industry and a seemingly technically impossible goal for all those involved in the thermal imaging world.

Until now, the current generation of FPA based cameras have required frequent shuttered calibration (NUC or Wink) blanking off the incoming image with a “shutter” or “flag” and rendering the observer “blind” to the scene for several seconds at a time.

In critical situations such as target tracking, on-line machine vision or weapon based applications, this complete obstruction to vision can be at least inconvenient and at worst, fatal.

Each element in the FPA detector possesses a different gain and offset value which require continuous adjustment to present a uniform image. Many factors including external ambient temperature, drift and the temperature of the detector itself lead to a fundamental fixed pattern noise in the detector output. This leads to steady deterioration of image quality over time.