Acquisition of noise-free and noisy signal: effect of different staring focal-plane-array pixel geometry

Abstract

Spatial averaging technique has been used to compare the signal acquisition performance of hexagonally sampled arrays with rectangular, hexagonal and rhombic pixel shapes of equivalent area. In noise-free case, a modulation transfer function (MTF) value, which is almost similar to the MTF of the rectangular pixel shape, is obtained for the rhombic pixel shape. However, in detecting noisy signal, the probability density function (pdf) of the detected signal of the rhombic pixel geometry lies in between that of the other two pixel shapes.<>