Abstract
Thermal imager is now regarded as one of the key observation devices for ISR activities and getting important more and more. As other detectors, however, the thermal detectors also have maximum input and therefore they will be saturated if the input IR energy exceeds the allowed range. The saturation in the thermal detector makes it impossible to distinguish the target from background, as a result, the thermal imager does not perform its own mission anymore. In order to get an insight related with the image saturation, this paper develops a saturation model for a thermal imaging system, not a thermal detector. The proposed modeling starts from analyzing the specification of a thermal imager. Coupled with the characteristic parameters of the object, the saturation model can be used to predict the distance on which the detector is saturated. The proposed saturation model prove its validity by applying it for the case of observing a flash-bang.