Thermal Imagers: from ancient analog video output to state-of-the-art video streaming

摘要

The video output of thermal imagers stayed constant over almost two decades. When the famous Common Modules were employed a thermal image at first was presented to the observer in the eye piece only, In the early 1990s TV cameras were attached and the standard output was CCIR. In the civil camera market output standards changed to digital formats a decade ago with digital video streaming being nowadays state-of-the-art. The reasons why the output technique in the thermal world stayed unchanged over such a long time are: the very conservative view of the military community, long planning and turn-around times of programs and a slower growth of pixel number of TIs in comparison to consumer cameras. With megapixel detectors the CCIR output format is not sufficient any longer. The paper discusses the state-of-the-art compression and streaming solutions for TIs.