High-order nonlinear response correction method for infrared radiation detector
Authors: Sun Yong-Feng , Xu Liang , Shen Xian-Chun , Jin Ling , Xu Han-Yang , Cheng Xiao-Xiao , Wang Yu-Hao , Liu Wen-Qing , Liu Jian-Guo ,   Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China,   University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
Published: November 2020

The infrared detector can generate nonlinear response error when the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer is used for implementing the radiometric calibration or observing the high temperature targets. Based on the relationship between the incident radiation intensity and the electron concentration in the optical conduction band, the mechanism of the nonlinear response error caused by the high incident photon flow is analyzed. According to Planck radiation law and interference principle, the effect of nonlinear error on spectrum is studied by simulating blackbody radiation data with nonlinear error. It is found that the nonlinear response with a different order has a different influence region, and the higher-order nonlinear response has a wider influence range and generates a larger nonlinear response error. By the general nonlinear response correction method the nonlinear response coefficient is obtained through constructing the nonlinear response model of the interference data and then the spectral distortion produced by the detector is corrected. According to the convolution iteration method, the polar orbit meteorological satellite CrIS constructs the convolution equation to correct the second-order nonlinear response by taking the low-wave number band of 50－500 cm<sup>–1</sup> as the characteristic region. The European Meteorological Agency’s Airborne Infrared Interferometer Evaluation System (ARIES) selected two feature areas, 50－500 cm<sup>–1</sup> and 2000－2500 cm<sup>–1</sup>, and iteratively corrected the second-order and third-order nonlinear response. The gradient descent method is often used to solve the optimization problems of unconstrained multivariate functions. Based on the gradient descent algorithm, an iterative method suitable for correcting the high-order nonlinear response errors is proposed in this paper. In this method, the information about the iteration point is obtained by constructing the nonlinear response function of the high-order detector and setting the appropriate iteration initialization. According to the initial value of the iteration and the information about the known iteration point, the gradient of the iteration variable is calculated to determine the iteration value of the next unknown variable, thus quickly searching for the global minimum point and determining the nonlinear response coefficient. We use Fourier transform infrared spectrometer to carry out radiometric calibration experiment and compare the effects of three correction methods: convolution, cross iteration and gradient descent method. The results show that the three correction methods can effectively reduce the nonlinear error, and improve the fitting extent by 0.15%, 0.29% and 0.39% respectively. The spectral data corrected by gradient descent method are more accurate.