Our second major project, a bachelor internship, focused on the development of a thermal imaging system for
Active Photonics AG, Villach, Carinthia.
Here's an example for a practical application:
firefighter's helmet mounted thermal imager
Our challenge was to develop a FPA (Focal Plane Array) Microbolometer Thermal Camera. The core of the camera was to be a FPGA. Our tasks contained the control circuit of the sensor and the shutter mechanism, the development of algorithms for picture linearization, picture correction and optimization. The algorithms were designed and tested with the aid of Matlab to implement them in VHDL thereupon.
The project steps were to establish a prototype of the sensor, the test of the algorithms and finally optimizations. The main goal was to design a single chip solution based on the mentioned FPGA.
We assigned the working titel ΠC (Project Infrared Camera) to describe these tasks.