"Infrared sensor" redirects here. For other kinds of infrared sensors, see Passive infrared sensor, Infrared point sensor, and Nondispersive infrared sensor.
Image of a Pomeranian taken in mid-infrared ("thermal") light (false-color)
A thermographic camera (also called an infrared camera or thermal imaging camera or thermal imager) is a device that creates an image using infrared radiation, similar to a common camera that forms an image using visible light. Instead of the 400–700 nanometre range of the visible light camera, infrared cameras are sensitive to wavelengths from about 1,000 nm (1 μm) to about 14,000 nm (14 μm). The art of capturing and analyzing the data they provide is called thermography.
Explanation:Discovery and research of infrared radiation
Infrared was discovered in 1800 by Sir William Herschel as a form of radiation beyond red light. These "infrared rays" (infra is the Latin prefix for "below") were used mainly for thermal measurement.[1] There are four basic laws of IR radiation: Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, Stefan-Boltzmann law, Planck's law, and Wien's displacement law. The development of detectors was mainly focused on the use of thermometers and bolometers until World War I. A significant step in the development of detectors occurred in 1829, when Leopoldo Nobili, using the Seebeck effect, created the first known thermocouple, fabricating an improved thermometer, a crude thermopile. He described this instrument to Macedonio Melloni. Initially, they jointly developed a greatly improved instrument. Subsequently, Melloni worked alone, developing an instrument in 1833 (a multielement thermopile) that could detect a person 10 metres away.[2] The next significant step in improving detectors was the bolometer, invented in 1880 by Samuel Pierpont Langley.[3] Langley and his assistant Charles Greeley Abbot continued to make improvements in this instrument. By 1901, it had the capability to detect radiation from a cow from 400 metres away, and was sensitive to differences in temperature of one hundred thousandths of a degree Celsius.[4] The first commercial thermal imaging camera was sold in 1965 for high voltage power line inspections.
The first advanced application of IR technology in the civil section may have been a device to detect the presence of icebergs and steamships using a mirror and thermopile, patented in 1913.[5] This was soon outdone by the first true IR iceberg detector, which did not use thermopiles, patented in 1914 by R.D. Parker.[6] This was followed up by G.A. Barker's proposal to use the IR system to detect forest fires in 1934.[7] The technique was not truly industrialized until it was used in the analysis of heating uniformity in hot steel strips in 1935.[8]
First thermographic camera
In 1929, Hungarian physicist Kálmán Tihanyi invented the infrared-sensitive (night vision) electronic television camera for anti-aircraft defense in Britain.[9] The first American thermographic cameras developed were infrared line scanners. This was created by the US military and Texas Instruments in 1947[10][failed verification] and took one hour to produce a single image. While several approaches were investigated to improve the speed and accuracy of the technology, one of the most crucial factors dealt with scanning an image, which the AGA company was able to commercialize using a cooled photoconductor.[11]
The first infrared linescan system was the British Yellow Duckling of the mid-1950s.[12] This used a continuously rotating mirror and detector, with Y axis scanning by the motion of the carrier aircraft. Although unsuccessful in its intended application of submarine tracking by wake detection, it was applied to land-based surveillance and became the foundation of military IR linescan.
This work was further developed at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in the UK when they discovered that mercury cadmium telluride was a photoconductor that required much less cooling. Honeywell in the United States also developed arrays of detectors which could cool at a lower temperature,[further explanation needed] but they scanned mechanically. This method had several disadvantages which could be overcome using an electronic scanning system. In 1969 Michael Francis Tompsett at English Electric Valve Company in the UK patented a camera which scanned pyro-electronically and which reached a high level of performance after several other breakthroughs throughout the 1970s.[13] Tompsett also proposed an idea for solid-state thermal-imaging arrays, which eventually led to modern hybridized single-crystal-slice imaging devices.[11]
