Experience-based noise model of infrared detectors for system dimensioning and simulation

• Spatial noise from infrared detector arrays is almost always assumed to be Gaussian. • In reality, infrared detector arrays often exhibit non-Gaussian spatial noise. • Failure to take non-Gaussianity into account prevents proper measurement of noise power. • Spatial noise can be modeled as a mixture of a Gaussian and a Student distribution. • This model should make it possible to compare infrared detectors noise objectively. We show that infrared detectors frequently exhibit non-Gaussian spatial noise, which makes it difficult to compare their performance. The power-law-like behavior we show can be very detrimental to certain detection missions, hence the need to characterize this noise. We demonstrate that a simple mixture of Gaussian and Student processes corresponds to the observed example, and that the parameter determination procedure described here reaches its theoretical limit.