Owl AI published a new article covered in the November 2024 Vision Systems Design Magazine.
Read the full article HERE
Quick Excerpt:
…. Meeting the demanding automotive requirements for cost, performance and tolerance of extreme environments simultaneously will qualify the new camera for use in other volume applications currently served only by visible cameras. Consider:
- Thermal home surveillance system working at night and in rain or fog for longer distance use cases.
- Autonomous vehicles operating safely without natural or artificial light
- Acquisition of thermal data from light, low-cost drones
- Continuous monitoring of production equipment for overheating
- Inspection of new assemblies like circuit boards for hot spots
What exactly do we have to do to reach this goal?
Low-Cost and High-Performance Thermal Cameras
The defense community calls the technique needed SWaP-C. This term is used to focus efforts on reductions in the physical characteristics of Size, Weight, and Power while simultaneously reducing Cost. Successfully achieving this combination requires returning to design principles so that new designs avoid the legacies that would result in increasing cost when the physical parameters are improved.
In uncooled thermal imaging, these legacies include the structure of the microbolometer array, the configuration of the readout circuitry, the methods of implementing image data corrections, and the architecture of the camera electronics. All of these must be reconsidered to achieve the goals of a small, high-performance, low-cost thermal camera.
Taking them in turn, let us start with Size. Cooled cameras are large because the operating temperatures they require necessitate the use of mechanical refrigerators called Stirling cycle coolers. The bulk, reliability, and cost of these drove the change to uncooled cameras. However, uncooled thermal cameras are still large compared to visible cameras with common, practical performance characteristics.
