Correcting the effect of temperature on image quality of thermal imaging objectives by wavefront coding technique

Abstract

The paper has proposed a method for correcting the effect of temperature on the imaging quality of thermal imaging systems by wavefront coding technology. A cubic phase mask was added to the aperture diaphragm of the thermal imaging objective to obtain a temperature-invariant point spread function (PSF). The received images will be of low quality but almost invariant with the change in temperature. An inverse filter was used to recover high-quality images over a variable temperature range. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a thermal imaging objective was used to experiment. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the temperature influence on the image quality of the thermal imaging objective.