Variable Aperture Non-Uniformity Correction

Ascendant Engineering Solutions (AES) proposes to develop the algorithms, modeling methodology, and performance metrics to evaluate the feasibility of leveraging a variable-aperture mechanism in the cold space of a thermal IR imaging system to correct for sensor non-uniformity.  Traditional NUC requires momentarily blocking the operator’s view of a scene.  The proposed mechanism instead uses the reduction in incident flux caused by stopping down the aperture to solve for the offset component of the sensor nonuniformity.  AES further proposes that if the variable aperture mechanism were placed in the warm space of the system, the same technique could be extended to infer both the unknown gain and offset components.   AES proposes demonstrating these algorithms on synthetic sample imagery corrupted by known sensor non-uniformities.  AES will further demonstrate how this technique is compatible with and can augment existing NUC techniques.   AES expects to demonstrate a prototype of this algorithm using an MWIR or LWIR sensor on an optical breadboard by the end of the Phase I option period.