Adapting thermal-infrared technology and astronomical techniques for use in conservation biology

Astro-Ecology couples 'off the shelf' infrared imaging technology and astronomy instrumentation techniques for application in the field of conservation biology. Microbolometers are uncooled, infrared systems that image in the thermal-infrared range (8-15μm). These cameras are potentially ideal to use for the detection and monitoring of vulnerable species and are readily available as 'off the shelf' systems. However to optimise the quality of the data for this purpose requires thorough detector calibration to account for the systematics that limit readout accuracy. In this paper we apply three analogous, standard astronomical instrumentation techniques to characterise the random and spatial noise present in a FLIR Tau 2 Core thermal-infrared camera. We use flat fielding, stacking and binning to determine that microbolometer FPAs are dominated by large structure noise and demonstrate how this can be corrected by subtracting median stacks of flat field exposures.