Thermographic Imaging Selecting an IR Camera with the Right Detector

The thermographic imaging characteristics of an IR camera are largely determined by its detector assembly. Infrared radiation (IR) is focused onto the camera’s detector assembly, which is a focal plane array (FPA) that converts IR into a visual image depicting temperature variations across the camera’s field of view (FOV). The FPA consists of thousands of pixels, which could be fabricated from any one of the IR sensitive materials commonly used in these cameras. Most detector materials respond to a selected portion of the IR spectrum (Figure 1). Therefore, a camera selected for any given application should have the appropriate FPA material based on the IR characteristics of objects within the FOV and the user’s study objectives.