FLIR Camera Question...

For all of those out there that have used a FLIR Camera on their vehicle, I have a question for you..... My FLIR is the Caddy Night Vision camera on my H1. It seems really "snowy" looking especially when the background is dark. Night or Day. Do you remember what it was like without cable TV? Your antenna gave you a really snowy picture. Same kind of look on my monitor. I have a good signal coming in. There is a gray scale at the very bottom of the screen and its sharp and clear. When I come up on a car, and the vehicle picture gets about half screen, the snow seems to get lighter or smaller. I swapped out the camera and the same snowy picture.
Is this something normal or do I have two bad cameras?


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I can't really speak on the car systems, but my camera I use for testing at work has a few calibration settings. They're for different temperature ranges (which actually kind of sucks. They can clearly do a 1000 degree range, but why cant they do a range from 0 to 1000 F, you know, something that would be useful. but I digress...)
Maybe there is something similar for your application? Something in the program?
Just a thought.

check this one out! its pretty cool.

http://golight.com/products/newproducts/helios.html

This is a very old thread, but I just stumbled across it and thought I'd add my thoughts. It sounds to me like your cameras autogain feature is over-driving the image gain level when the scene contains very little delta-temperature. IR camera gain is like contrast for visible cameras. It's used to enhance details in images of uniform temperatures (or greyscale in visible terms). Gain is helpful to a point. When camera gain is driven too high, the pixel noise generated by the focal plane array becomes noticeable in the image. This creates the snowy effect you're describing. And, as you described, when a highly contrasting object enters the scene and becomes large enough that the autogain algorithm reacts to it, the gain level comes down, and the snow goes away. This behavior is normal for LWIR cameras, although not desirable. Some cameras will allow you to set a maximum gain level, effectively limiting the range of autogain feature. This will alleviate the snow on a dark scene, but will also limit your image contrast, meaning you may not see slightly warmer objects, or small warm objects, against the background. I assume you have no control over any of these features in your camera. But, at least you know your camera is working correctly, and will generate a usable image when there's something in the scene worth looking at.

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Rokit

I have no idea what Rokit just said but it sounds really good.

...kinda like turning RF gain up on a HAM radio when there are no signals.... all you get is noise.....

I have a thermal rifle sight. It is a little grainy, night or day. Wish it had a gain like adjustment but it doesn't. I plan on buying a much nicer, read expensive, thermal rifle sight at some point. Some of the high end FLIR and even ATN thermal sights are pretty good.