Calibration-based NUC Method in Real-time Based on IRFPA

The non-uniformity of Infrared Focal Plane Array (IRFPA) resulted from the limits of the detector's materials and the manufacturing process affects the performance of the staring IR imaging system. To address this problem, non-uniformity correction (NUC), applied for real-time resolution, is the important issue in the IR imaging information processing system. This thesis introduces method of non-uniformity correction. Considering the nonlinear character of IRFPA, the calibration-based polynomial NUC method is proposed in the hardware system. Comparing with the conventional NUC schemes, polynomial method can achieve better NUC performance and implement in real-time. The algorithm is designed based on System architecture for FPGA hardware, for which is the Xilinx ML402 platform dedicated for video processing, which consists of A/D and D/A converter, and Virtex-4 FPGA on the mother board. The polynomial method reduces the non-uniformity in the infrared image largely, implemented at real-time, as well as the advantage of wide dynamic range.