Analysis of improvement amount of typical microscanning modes to IR imagery quality

Microscanning is an important technique in high-resolution IR imaging field. It can increase the system resolution and improve the performance of imaging systems. For the optimum design of IR staring imaging system with microscanning modes, it is necessary to study the effect of different microscanning modes on the image quality. Three types of microscanning modes generally used, 2 × 2, 3 × 3, 4 × 4, are analyzed in this paper. Under some assumptions, this paper introduces sampling-averaging MTF of detector array at spatial Nyquist frequency to quantitatively study the improvement of different microscanning modes to image quality. Finally, image histogram analysis method is used to discuss qualitatively the effect of microscanning modes on the image quality. Simulation experimental results show a good agreement with theoretical analysis.