An Optical Readout Method Based Uncooled Infrared Imaging System

Abstract

This paper presents an optical readout method based uncooled infrared imaging system that contains an optical read-out section and a bi-material micro-cantilever arrays (BMCA) detector. The optical read-out section is based on incoherent light spatial filter technique. The read-out section converts the deflection angles of BMCA caused by absorption of infrared (IR) radiation to a visible image through optical filtering operation of the BMCA with a knife-edge filter. A spatial mathematical model is presented to describe the read-out method and its validity is proved. The IR image of a person's hand obtained through the using of the 100×100 BMCA and the 12-bit A/D quantizer demonstrates the ability of the system to create image. The performance test shows that the average Noiseequivalent temperature difference (NETD) of the imaging system can arrive at about 183 mK with some areas having a NETD as low as 78 mK.