Time calibration of thermal rolling shutter infrared cameras

The working principle of nearly all uncooled microbolometer thermal imaging systems is based on the rolling shutter principle. This results in time delays between rows giving rise to distorted and blurred images which are difficult to correlate with, for example instantaneous numerical simulation results for nondestructive evaluation. Until today high-end and high-cost thermal cameras need to be used for instantaneous measurements. Furthermore, quantitative defect evaluation on average conductive materials is difficult to perform as a result of the rolling shutter blur of the uncooled cameras. In this contribution, a time delay compensation method is designed. The developed algorithm is described and a measurement routine is elaborated to measure the inter- and intra-frame delays between two pixels. Finally, an artificial global shutter image sequence is developed using linear interpolation between the original fluctuating frames. We will show that by applying our proposed method, the intra-frame delay can be predicted and compensated with an accuracy of 16μs. Besides, there is only made use of low-cost equipment to provide a straight-forward methodology which makes it applicable for the further integration of low-cost microbolometers in industry. This means that we have made the application of low-cost microbolometers feasible for instantaneous measurements.