The purpose of this article is to present the procedures most commonly used to design an optronic system and evaluate its characteristics.
To do this, we first recall the general problem of signal detection, which is found not only in optics, but also in many other fields such as radar, telecommunications and transmissions, automatic measurement, pattern recognition and so on. Paragraph 2 illustrates the problem of optical detection qualitatively, using the classic example of observing a scene.
Depending on signal processing, optronic systems can be divided into two categories: on the one hand, systems with "automatic detection", i.e. without any human intervention in the operation of the device, and on the other, systems with "visualization", in which an operator intervenes and observes a screen.