Smart Sensors

The term “Smart Sensors” refers to sensors which contain both sensing and signal processing capabilities with objectives ranging from simple viewing to sophisticated remote sensing, surveillance, search/track, weapon guidance, robotics, perceptronics and intelligence applications.Recently this approach is achieving higher goals by a new and revolutionary sensors concept which introduced inside the sensor some of the basic functions of living eyes, such as dynamic stare, non-uniformity compensation, spatial and temporal filtering.New objectives and requirements are presented for this type of new infrared smart sensor systems.This paper is concerned with the front end of FPA microbolometers processing, namely, the enhancement of target-to-noise ratio by background clutter suppression and the improvement in target detection by “smart” and pattern correlation thresholding.