GOLD STANDARD TECHNOLOGY

BST (Barium-Strontium Titanate) is a material that forms the basis of the technology that started the revolution in commercially-available thermal-imaging equipment.  It was the first technology to be available and affordable for ordinary police cruisers, for firefighters in every city and town, and for everyday drivers of automobiles.

Despite the introduction of a plethora of thermal imaging sensors by a wide variety of manufacturers, BST technology has maintained a respectable market share because of its unique properties.  It is the only AC-coupled sensor in production, and, as such, it exhibits very little of the spatial noise that compromises the performance of competing DC-coupled sensors.  For that reason, customers and potential users are virtually unanimous in ranking its imagery as the best – the “Gold Standard” – to which all others are to be compared.  While competitors may deride its performance in laboratory tests, users are well aware that it exceeds competing technologies in real-world sensitivity and dynamic range.  This results from AC coupling as well as from the fact that it responds to temperature differences between each point in the scene and the local average of the temperature near that point.  This enables, for example, a firefighter to see detail in a very hot fire while simultaneously seeing detail in another part of the scene that is close to normal room temperature.

BST technology also offers a robustness that is unmatched by any other available technology.  BST systems use a chopper, whereas other technologies use a shutter – the difference being that a chopper operates continuously at very low torque, and a shutter operates only occasionally and at much higher torque.  There is no substantial reliability or cost advantage of either.  Using a chopper, however, greatly simplifies the design and operation of the system, especially when the detector is AC-coupled.  It eliminates the large offset portion of the detector output, obviating the need to electronically process it; it reduces the range requirements of digitization circuitry; it permits continuous viewing without the scene-blocking occasionally caused by a shutter; it eliminates the memory and processing requirements of large calibration tables.

BST technology has served well for many years, and it remains the technology of choice  when image quality of the utmost importance.