<title>Atmospheric effects on IR sensor performance: theory and recent experimental results</title>

Abstract

The development of IR sensors with better spatial, temporal and thermal resolution pushes the necessity to revise and quantify the different atmospheric effects on sensor performance. In this paper, a high resolution IR sensor for point target detection is used as an example to show theoretically and experimentally the relevant atmospheric limitations. Special emphasis is put on the signal-to-noise ratio of point like objects in IR image sequences, on track evaluation of such objects, on the impact of optical turbulence, polarization and refraction in the track analysis.