High Throughput Thermal Camera Characterization

Time and resource constraints often limit the number of cameras available to establish statistical confidence in determining if a device meets a desired range performance requirement. For thermal cameras, measurements of sampling/resolution, sensitivity and temporal response are combined through the Targeting Task Performance (TTP) metric to predict range. To accommodate a large volume of cameras, we utilized a rotation stage to iterate across the required measurements, with only a single connection instance to the camera. Automation in collection, processing, and device communication reduces opportunities for human error, further improving confidence in the results. To accommodate variations in mounting, cameras were automatically registered to the measurement setup, ensuring accurate analysis and facilitating automatic processing. Additional efficiency was accomplished through processing the measurements in parallel with data collection, reducing the time for full analysis of a single camera from 30 minutes down to 4 minutes. From this work, a statistically relevant sampling of range was accumulated, along with other metrics, to gain insight into manufacturing repeatability, correlated metrics, and datasets for device emulation. In support of the reproducible research effort, many of the analysis scripts used in this work are available for download at [1].