Technical Study For Uncooled Infrared Sight System

Since 90s in last century, UIRFPA ( uncooled infrared focus plane array ) has achieved great development. The UIRFPA technical has been developed from small scope to middle or large scope, such as 320X320, 640X480 array. Super-large scope 1024×1024 UIRFPA may be developed in the future several years. The pixel size shall be reduced from 50μm to 25μm, and sensitivity shall be increased further.The uncooled infrared sight system has been applied in light weapon system, such as machine gun sight, individual solder's sight, hand-held thermal imager in military and civil production more and more, some of them are equipped with army. The uncooled infrared sight system maybe replace cooling thermal imaging system which is high cost, unreliable and large size in recent years.Around the theme of technical study for infrared sight system, starting with basic theory, analyze basic principle of infrared thermal imaging system, main factor that affects system operation in this paper. We put emphasis on design and calculation of infrared optical system, describe performance evaluation method of system and index at last, give a guide in theory for system design.Important technical performance of thermal imaging system introduced in this paper, such as Minimum Resolution Temperature Difference, MTF have been tested. The result shows that thermal imaging system introduced in this paper meet the requirement of military application.