A novel non-uniformity evaluation metric of infrared imaging system

Non-uniformity (NU) evaluation metric of infrared thermal imaging system is important for evaluating the thermal imager and also can help to improve existing NU correction methods. However, in existing evaluation metrics, there are still some problems, such as not objective enough and not comprehensive enough. This paper brings forward a novel NU evaluation metric, in which we adopt the average derivative of the response of thermal imager with the temperature of test blackbody as a new parameter. A metric-temperature curve which shows the change trend of the NU with the temperature of test blackbody was achieved to enhance the performance of NU evaluation metric. Both the subjective images and objective data indicate that the new method raised in this work is much more objective and comprehensive. Our work is expected to become a general NU evaluation metric in the future.