Nowadays, extensive efforts are deployed for achieving multiband or hyperspectral imaging operating in the infrared windows. It is known that most of the infrared energy can only be observed and measured through infrared cameras, telescopes, or night-vision goggles. All of these technologies use infrared waves to track the heat released, or radiated, by an object. Indeed, depending on the temperature, the internal energy changes and outputs an infrared spectrum with corresponding wavelength span and intensity spectral distribution. Thus, from the specific spectral profile, it becomes possible to retrieve and analyze many properties of the object such as the molecular composition, the thermal distribution, the surface texture, etc. For a better target recognition and identification, the spectral image fusion technology, which combines images from different spectral bands, can be utilized.  To meet the growing demands for fused multi-band infrared imaging, the authors of this article propose the development of a dual-mode colloidal quantum-dot infrared detector, which provides unprecedented bias-dependent single-band Short Wavelength Infrared (SWIR) imaging mode and fused-band Short Wavelenth Infrared/Medium Wavelength Infrared (SWIR/MWIR) mode. The SWIR mode provides details of the scene such as visible light, while the fused SWIR/MWIR mode adds thermal information directly to the SWIR image on the detector level. By fusing information on the detector level, fused images without registration error can be achieved, which is a great advantage over current image fusion methods with separate imagers. Therefore, the dual-mode detectors provide night vision and thermal information-enhanced night vision imaging capability, which could be highly meaningful for the realization of advanced applications, including self-driving, computer vision, biomedical imaging, and meteorological sensing.

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