User:The Lamb of God/sanbox-Minimum Detectable Temperature

Minimum detectable temperature

Minimum Detectable Temperature (MDT), also called Minimum Detectable Temperature Difference (MDTD), is not the same phenomenon as "MRTD" and is only subtely different. Like MRTD it is a measure of the performance of infrared cameras. However, MDT is a measure of visibility, not resovability.

Manual test

The manual subjective test for MDT is similar to the one for MRTD. A trained operator views a series of pinhole targets at different spatial frequencies. For each series of pinhole targets the operator ramps the blackbody (source of IR radiation) up and down untill the targets are "just visible". The data at which the pinhole targets are "just visible" is inputed into an array and plotted against spatial frequency, and a curve is fitted to the data. The MDT curve is thus defined as the $\Delta \,$ temperature versus spatial frequency.