At the Kinetic-kill vehicle Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator (KHILS) facility located at Eglin AFB, Florida, a technology has been developed for the projection of scenes to support hardware-in-the-loop testing of infrared seekers. The Wideband Infrared Scene Projector program is based on a 512 X 512 VLSI array of 2 mil pitch resistors. A characteristic associated with these projectors is each resistor emits measurably different in-band radiance when the same voltage is applied. Therefore, since it is desirable to have each resistor emit the same for a commanded radiance, each resistor requires a Non-Uniformity Correction (NUC). Though this NUC task may seem simple to a casual observer, it is, however, quite complicated. A high quality infrared camera and well-designed optical system are prerequisites to measuring each resistor's output accurately for correction. A technique for performing a NUC on a resistor array has been developed and implemented at KHILS that achieves a NUC (standard deviation output/mean output) of less than 1 percent. This paper presents details pertaining to the NUC system, procedures, and results.

Date Published: 19 July 1999
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 3697, Technologies for Synthetic Environments: Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing IV, (19 July 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.352919

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3697:
Technologies for Synthetic Environments: Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing IV
Robert Lee Murrer Jr., Editor(s)