Design and development of polarization-low level light integrated EMCCD camera

Multi-dimensional information acquisition is the future development direction of the low-level-light (LLL) night vision detection technology. Polarization imaging is a dimension in the field of photoelectric detection, and the development of polarization camera is the premise of studying polarization imaging technology. The electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD) device integrates polarization array structure, which has the advantage of LLL detection and the function of polarization dimension detection. Based on this device, the hardware circuit design and development scheme of polarization LLL integrated camera were discussed. The camera could complete the synchronous acquisition of polarization dimension information and light intensity information, and the original data was processed by polarization operation through FPGA. Then, the processed image data was transmitted to the PC. A test system was built to analyze the performance of the developed polarization camera. The experimental results show that, at 273 K temperature and 2 MHz readout frequency, the readout noise of the device is 8.81e-, the dynamic range is about 74 dB, the extinction ratio of the camera can reach 50.95, and the transmissivity can reach 60.16%. The camera can selectively output the degree of polarization image, the angle of polarization image, the image of light intensity and polarization fusion in real time, which greatly improves the recognition and detection ability of targets in the night environment.