Omap-based Uncooled Focal Plane Infrared Camera Design

Having all the advantages of being contact-free, real-time, visualized and accurate, infrared technique is now getting more and more broadly used in both military and civil applications. The development of Uncooled Microbolometer Infrared Focal Plane Arrays makes the infrared system cheaper, smaller, lighter and more portable. OMAP5910 is a dual-processor chip designed by Texas Instrument, and it's a low energy consuming chip with very strong ability. An application of uncooled focal plane arrays (UFPA) thermal imaging instrument based on OMAP5910 is described in this paper.Firstly, the thesis introduces the development of UFPA thermal imaging instrument, describes the basic structure of uncooled microbolometer infrared focal plane arrays and its working theory. Together with a brief introduction to the structure of uncooled microbolometer detector ML703. Then OMAP5910's characteristics are discussed, particularly the communication method used between its ARM processor and DSP processor. What's more, the thesis also establishes an embedded application based on OMAP5910, discussing the following contents: hardware structure and sub-systems' functions, design of an embedded Linux operation system, application programs based on Qt/Embedded and the communication method( based on DSP Gateway ) used between ARM and DSP. At last, there will be a summary of the application's structure and its performance, and then some suggestions on its improvement will be given.