• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.251-257
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• 2015

This work presents modelling and simulation of a readout integrated circuit (ROIC) design considering pair-wise serial configuration along with thermal modeling of an uncooled microbolometer array. A fully differential approach is used at the input stage in order to reduce fixed pattern noise due to the process variation and self-heating-related issues. Each pair of microbolometers is pulse-biased such that they both fall under the same self-heating point along the self-heating trend line. A ${\pm}10%$ process variation is considered. The proposed design is simulated with a reference input image consisting of an array of $127{\times}92$ pixels. This configuration uses only one unity gain differential amplifier along with a single 14-bit analog-to-digital converter in order to minimize the dynamic range requirement of the ROIC.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.119-122
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• 2009

As infrared light radiates, the CMOS Readout IC (ROIC) for the microbolometer typed infrared sensor detects voltage or current which is caused by the variation of resistance in the bolometer sensor. A serious problem we may have in designing the ROIC is the value of bolometer and reference resistors will be changed due to process variation. Since each pixel does not have the same value of resistance, fixed pattern noise problems happen during the sensor operations. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to compensate the fluctuation of reference resistance with taking account of process variation. By using a comparator and a cross coupled latch, we will make the value of reference resistor same as the bolometer's.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.624-628
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• 2013

With the recent development of less-costly uncooled detector technology, expensive optics are among the remaining significant cost drivers in the thermography camera. As a potential solution to this problem, the fabrication of IR lenses using chalcogenide glass has been studied in recent years. We report on the molding and evaluation of a ultra-precision chalcogenide-glass lens for the thermography camera for body-temperature monitoring. In addition, we fabricated prototype thermography camera using the chalcogenide-glass lens and obtained the thermal image from the camera. In this work, it was found out that thermography camera discerned body-temperature between 20 and $50^{\circ}C$ through the analysis of thermal image. It is confirmed that thermography camera using the chalcogenide-glass lens is applicable to the body-temperature monitoring system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.162-169
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• 2019

This paper describes a thermal image processing algorithm for uncooled type TEC-less IR detector which is applicable to fire control system of small arms. We implemented a real-time gain and offset compensation algorithm based on polynomial approximation from the raw dataset which is acquired by two reference temperature of blackbody from various FPA(Focal Plane Array) temperature. Through the experiment, we analyzed the output characteristics of detector's raw-data and compared IR image quality to traditional non-uniformity correction method. It shows that the proposed method works well in all FPA temperature range with low residual non-uniformity.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.32-39
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• 2011

The output image of the uncooled thermal infrared camera is difficult the identification of target because of the limited dynamic range and the various noises. Retinex algorithm based on the theory of the human visual perception is known to be effective contrast enhancement technique. However, the image quality is insufficient when it is adopted to the narrow dynamic range image as the infrared image. In this paper, we propose the revised retinex algorithm to enhance the contrast of the infrared image. To improve the contrast enhancement performance, we designed the new dynamic range compression function instead of log function. To reduce the noise and compensate the loss of edge, we added the contrast compensation procedure in the MSR image generation process. According to the output picture comparing and numerical analysis, the proposed algorithm shows the better contrast enhancement performance and the more suitable method for the infrared image enhancement.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.148-149
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• 2008

As infrared light is radiated, the CMOS Readout IC (ROIC) for the microbolometer type infrared sensor detects voltage or current when the resistance value in the bolometer sensor varies. One of the serious problems in designing the ROIC is that resistances in the bolometer and reference resistor have process variation. This means that each pixel does not have the same resistance, causing serious fixed pattern noise problems in sensor operations. In this paper, Reference resistor compensation technique was proposed. This technique is to compensate the reference resistance considering the process variation, and it has the same reference resistance value as a bolometer cell resistance by using a comparator and a cross coupled latch.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.7-8
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• 2009

In the presence of infrared light, a CMOS Readout IC (ROIC) for a microbolometer typed infrared sensor detects the voltage or current that is caused by the changing in resistance in the bolometer sensor. A serious problem in designing the ROIC is how the value of the bolometer and reference resistors vary because of variations in manufacturing process. Since different pixel have different, resistance values, sensor operations must contend with fixed pattern noise (FPN) problems. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to compensate for the fluctuation in reference resistance by tiling into account the process variation. By using constant current source basing and correlated double sampling, we solved FPN.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.138-144
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• 2007

This paper introduces the design techniques of an IR module using the 2-D array un-cooled type infrared detector which is applied to the individual combat weapon. Considering the size and weight of the hand carried weapon system, we used a very small-sized detector and applied an adaptive temperature control algorithm so that the operation consumed with low power can be possible. We applied the AR(Auto Regressive) filter to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in a thermal image processing step. We also applied the plateau equalization and boundary enhancement techniques to improve the visibility for human visual system.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.106-116
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• 2023

In this paper, we designed a coaxial dual camera incorporating two optical systems-one for the visible rays and the other for far-infrared ones-with the aim of capturing images in both wavelength ranges. The far-infrared system, which uses an uncooled detector, has a sensor array of 640×480 pixels. The visible ray system has 1,945×1,097 pixels. The coaxial dual optical system was designed using a hot mirror beam splitter to minimize heat transfer caused by infrared rays in the visible ray optical system. The optimization process revealed that the final version of the dual camera system reached more than 90% of the fusion performance between two separate images from dual systems. Multiple rigorous testing processes confirmed that the coaxial dual camera we designed demonstrates meaningful design efficiency and improved image conformity degree compared to existing dual cameras.