Development of a Novel Scene Simulator for Test of IR Homing Head in Lab

摘要

With the development of the new generation of infrared imaging guidance weapon systems, how to improve and assess their performance has become a hottopic in the field of simulation. In the lab, an effective way is to use technique of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HWIL) simulation. In this paper, a novel infrared (IR) scene simulator is presented. Its basic principle is to modulate the infrared radiation coming from a blackbody with infrared film, which, after the coupling of the infrared optical system, turns to be the directional light beam and is received by the infrared homing head. The IR image generator is installed in a 2-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) motion gimbals so that the IR image can move in the direction of azimuth and elevation relative to the IR homing head. The practical test of the user unit shows that the dynamic range of the output image of this simulator is large and its spatial resolution is better than 256x256. The last part of this paper provide the concrete performance indexes of this simulator and the experimental images it produces, under the different temperature conditions of the blackbody, captured by the HgCdTe infrared Thermograph.