BIRD IR sensor dynamic adaptation for high temperature event recognition

Abstract

Existing now spaceborne sensors are able to provide information on fire risk as well as to monitor burned areas. However, existing spaceborne sensors – mostly meteorological satellite sensors - used for active fire recognition suffer from serious limitations, such as saturation effects in the mid infrared channel. They present snapshots of fire occurrences only. The global change research and disaster management community expects from new and dedicated spaceborne fire observation sensors quantitative information on fire characteristics. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) and its industrial partner OHB-System, have been working on new spaceborne fire missions since 1994 [FIRES, 1994]. The first of them is DLR small satellite mission BIRD (Bi-spectral IR Detection), a techology demonstrator which will be launched mid of 2001. BIRD uses mid infrared range (MIR) at 4 µm and thermal infrared (TIR) at 9 µm solid state pushbroom imagers with real time digital signal processing providing an adaptive and very high dynamic range in radiometry for the High Temperature Event (HTE) recognition in the sub-pixel domain. The paper describes the physical background and the main technical solutions of the dynamic adaptation approach implemented within the BIRD-IR-Sensors.