A novel non-uniformity correction method based on ROIC

Infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPA) suffer from inherent low frequency and fixed patter noised (FPN). They are thus limited by their inability to calibrate out individual detector variations including detector dark current (offset) and responsivity (gain). To achieve high quality infrared image by mitigating the FPN of IRFPAs, we have developed a novel non-uniformity correction (NUC) method based on read-out integrated circuit (ROIC). The offset and gain correction coefficients can be calculated by function fitting for the linear relationship between the detector's output and a reference voltage in ROIC. We tested the purposed method using an infrared imaging system using the ULIS 03 19 1 detector with real nonuniformity. A set of 384*288 infrared images with 12 bits was collected to evaluate the performance. With the experiments, the non-uniformity was greatly eliminated. We also used the universe non-uniformity (NU) parameter to estimate the performance. The calculated NU parameters with the two-point calibration (TPC) and the purposed method imply that the purposed method has almost as good performance as TPC.