A frequency domain model for the spatial fixed-pattern noise in infrared focal plane arrays

The multiplicative and additive components of the fixed-pattern noise (FPN) in infrared (IR) focal plane arrays (FPAs) are typically modeled as time-stationary, spatially unstructured random processes. Even though the latter assumption is convenient, it is also inaccurate due to FPN is indeed observed as a spatial pattern, with random intensity values, superimposed over the true images. In this paper, the spatial structure in both the multiplicative and the additive components of the FPN has been modeled in the frequency domain. The key observation in the proposed models is that regular spatial patterns manifest themselves as narrowband components in the magnitude spectrum of an image. Thus, the spatial structure of FPN can be abstracted in a straightforward manner by approximating the spectral response of the FPN. Moreover, the random intensity of the FPN has been also modeled by matching the empirically estimated distributions of the intensity values of both multiplicative and additive components of the FPN. Experimental characterization of FPN has been conducted using black-body radiator sources, and the theoretical as well as practical applicability of the proposed models has been illustrated by both synthesizing FPN from three different IR cameras and by proposing a simple yet effective metric to assess the amount of FPN in FPA-based cameras.