Investigation of Response Compensation of Uncooled Microbolometer Infrared Camera

Abstract

Since the response delay of uncooled microbolometer infrared cameras is not small, large afterimages occur when taking thermal images of fast-moving objects or rapid temperature changes. In this work, an investigation was performed to compensate the response delay of an uncooled microbolometer to reconstruct thermal images without afterimages. The measurement by opening and closing the optical path with a chopper showed that the response delay can be well approximated by the first-order lag. In addition, it was demonstrated that the lag-free thermal images can almost be restored from the measured thermal images by compensating the delay using the first-order lag time constant.