Infrared imaging sensors are a vital component of modern military weapons and surveillance systems, which for land operations is dominated by uncooled thermal imagers using microbolometer array detectors. These sensors, just as for all electro-optical and infrared devices, are vulnerable to the ever-increasing threat of in-band laser weapons, which can perturb or destroy their operational effectiveness. Importantly, this can happen even for relatively low laser output power. In this article, we analyze the experimentally measured results of laser dazzle and subsequent damage on an uncooled long-wave thermal imager. The imager has a vanadium oxide microbolometer array of size 640x480 pixels. A tunable quantum cascade laser is used with power output less than 100mW and fixed at a wavelength of 10.6 micron. The laser power was increased in incremental steps with the imager positioned only a few meters away. We discovered that the pixels covered by the laser spot saturate, leading to damage from accumulated exposures of only a few seconds. Additionally, we recorded circular diffraction effects and blooming of the array. In summary, we observed that damage was inflicted to pixels on the microbolometer array well before any significant dazzling was achieved.
Imaging systems have found widespread applications in science and technology, in the civilian and military domains, ranging from detection, identification, recognition and videosurveillance. The interaction between laser light and the electro-optical sensors and optical devices present in these imaging systems is of great relevance, as they are very sensitive to intense light fluxes. From this point of view, coherent light sources such as lasers can prevent proper operation, or even cause irreversible damage to the sensors. In this work, visible and near-infrared lasers were employed to dazzle CCD and CMOS cameras, including wide field of view (WFOV) optics, commonly present in actual micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs). The influence of various parameters such as laser wavelength, irradiance and incidence angle on dazzling were studied. The present work contributes to a better understanding of dazzling effects on CCD and CMOS optical sensors, and will be useful in designing optoelectronic countermeasures.
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