As infrared detector technology continues to migrate from government labs to commercial markets, photonic system designers see new technology opportunities to accomplish their design goals. Concurrently, developments in IR sources make near-infrared solutions attractive in terms of cost and performance. This course will help system designers, researchers, integrators, applications engineers, and related professionals navigate the infrared spectrum and trade off performance parameters for their solutions in applications such as laboratory imaging, UAV ("drone") imaging, spectrometry, and biomedical diagnostics, while also considering cost.

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) continue to grow in importance in military and commercial applications, the need to understand radiometry with respect to many applications increases. This course presents the basic quantities and units of radiometry and photometry, and the propagation laws and approximations enabling flux transfer calculations. It introduces sources, blackbody radiation, optical material properties, detectors, and radiometric calibration. Applications are presented along with worked examples from the beginning of the course, and students have several opportunities to work problems on their own throughout the session.

While the calibration of advanced systems often features prominently in the optical spotlight, the calibration of components that go into these systems is no less important. In addition, some applications require only the use of a calibrated detector or source to meet measurement goals. This course will aid the component designer, systems designer, systems integrator, and other related professionals in understanding and filling the need for component-level calibration. It will survey source and detector calibration methods, address spectral calibration for instruments providing wavelength separation, survey test equipment calibration, and provide information enabling practitioners to perform a calibration uncertainty analysis at the component level.

The last several years have witnessed exponential growth in the application of UAVs to military and commercial problems, as well as greater utility of autonomous ground vehicles in many areas. Technology building blocks abound in the marketplace, but the knowledge needed to put them together leaves many questions open for the systems engineer or the end data user. Disciplines bearing on these issues—including radiometry, image quality, and atmospheric effects—are not often taught to those seeking a solution or applying mathematical algorithms to a data product. This half-day short course is meant to bridge these gaps by focusing on problems primarily using passive sensing in the visible, near-infrared, and thermal infrared spectral regions.

This course takes basic radiometric principles and applies them to calculate the amount of radiation reaching a system's entrance aperture or focal plane for a variety of source-system combinations. It provides a brief review of radiometric propagation laws and offers a wide array of examples. It is application-oriented with problems in solar thermal systems, sun and sky irradiance delivered to a collector, sensor signals from specular and diffuse reflectors, infrared imagery, star sensing, and integrating spheres. Several examples from The Art of Radiometry are provided.

In this half-day course the basic quantities of radiometry, their units, and their relationships to electro-magnetic field quantities are presented. Photometry, its units, and conversion factors to older units are also addressed. The course covers the fundamentals of blackbody radiation generation and transfer. The basic equations needed to set up and solve problems are discussed. The course introduces radiometric and photometric sources, detectors of optical radiation, instrumentation, and calibration. The supplementary textbook, <i>Introduction to Radiometry and Photometry</i> by Ross McCluney, is provided with the course and offers more detail in detector optical/ electrical characterization, color theory, and optical properties of specific materials. This course is an ideal lead-in to SC944 The Radiometry Case Files, which provides many applied examples of the concepts introduced here.