Slashdot Mirror
Infrared Webcam HOWTO
Geoff Johnson writes "Some of the Slashdot readers may be interested in this page I put together. It describes how to make an ordinary webcam see in the near infrared waveband."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Let me guess, remove the IR filter from in-front of the lens.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Now Paris Hilton's new sex tapes will be done by webcam... meaning even worse video quality! Seriously, though, that's pretty sweet. Props to this guy for figuring out how to do it.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Cause I'd really like to take my PC to the beach and get webcam shots of da honey's.
that's just fantatic!
Infared web cam? Somehow I don't think Bubble Cam would be quite the same at night. :D
I do wonder what the most common applications for Linux/IrDA are, considering the trend I've observed where among the most commonly requested Linux HOWTOs recently have been 'laptop', 'infrared' and 'webcam'. Is everyone building infrared webcams?
I Want To Believe
http://homepage.ntlworld.com.nyud.net:8090/geoff.j ohnson2/2004-08-08.avi
And now you can find the stuff that is under your bed that you never imagine hat has been there a long time.
http://www.michel.eti.br
Have you tried a universal remote that supports dog? It the pause button works then you need to talk to the patent lawyers.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...and, soon to come, the THEMcam!
SCNR... sometimes I'm amazed at what kinds of typos make it through to the frontpage.
But besides that, very nice article. I personally found IR very useful for some surveillance-type situations. A few years ago, my father set up an IR-sensitive camera and an IR diode in a birdhouse in our garden, which allowed us to watch the new-born ones without creating any disturbance.
WTF is the timelapse movie doing there?
Its cool and all, but I thought a gallery of instructions would tax his server enough.
Sucker for punishment?
liqbase
Does anybody think that coupled with a pure IR source of light this item would be useful in catching would-be prowlers without alerting them? OK, probably a stupid idea...
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I don't know about US money, but British notes look really cool under UV light.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Sorry, man. Slashdotting in progress.
Hmm, I opened my sweex webcam (the same he has) and unscrewed the lens. But my IR filter is round (so not a square as in his webcam) and won't come out.
Maybe you're confused here, and should check out some of those HOWTO's yourself (and read the article for once), to see what it is all about?
To use a webcam for looking in the infrared spectrum, is not the same as using infrared light for shortrange communications (IrDA, TV remote etc).
If you're lucky the webcam won't have an IR blocking filter.
You may want to check it with a remote (or just put your IR passing filter in front of it) before you take it apart.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
We've been buying VB-C50iR cameras from NuSpectra for construction monitoring. We can do all this--perhaps not as cheaply!
Pan/tilt/zoom control, day night filter (changes to IR/Night mode on a schedule)... Plus 26x optical zoom rocks.
NuSpectra has a demo camera out of their office in San Francisco.. See demo in upper right corner of page.
We also use the SiteProxy software that lets us build time-lapse movies from all the camera's preset positions on the fly.
Check em out!
Do you think his hair is transparent to IR, or the IR made his hair fall out?
Evil people are out to get you.
I've heard of a webcam, but never a wecam.
Hence the HOWTO, duh!
So the article details a cool hack, props. What I want to know is.....why was I able to download the 6.9 MB AVI file at the end. Isn't his server supposed to die or something? I can never download the files referenced by a /. link. Is something wrong?
Lets hack some cams, stick them on $89 lcd handheld tvs and send them to tibet as freedom fighter nightvision goggles.
It might make the fight more interesting.
Its Webcam, not wecam! :)
Actually, it's Uscam.
iCam just sounds too selfish.
altho, most that ive seen ahve the IR filter directly attached to the CCD.
:)
you would remove the CCD, then remove the 'piece of glass' from it.
some cameras achieve this effect differently, I have not quite worked out how they work.
For example, Sony camcorders that have 'nightshot'
also have an IR filter, but I suspect its something different. the switch not only engages some IR illuminators, but does something in the lens block itself. (switches something in/out mechanically)
I know that the IR filter at the CCD remains there, its in a fixed position.
I am now curious and have to dissasemble a sony lens block to see
I used to work on cameras, and I have removed the IR filters on cameras before for a bit of fun.
if you can get enough IR leds going you can get it pretty well lit.
Altho, the resolution is probably not going to be that great at a distance.
I just wonder why everything turns drab. I guess 'cause it can only get color with the black negative as opposed to the IR filter.
This came very close to replacing my current "Quick! Get pregnant." sig, but since I just put that on (and I love it) it's on my Bio instead. Absolutely hilarious. I bet the next Slashdot cliché/meme will be "But is it Sweex-specific?"
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Wow, just like those funny glasses I bought from the ad in the comic book back in the 60's.
U.S. notes not too interesting, just big black letters on light background saying "THIS IS YOUR GOD"
Actualy this is pretty much WW-II style technology, the old Sniper-Scopes used active IR like this web-cam mod. Now the problem is passive IR is so common firing up an IR illuminator is like painting a bull's-eye on your forehead. It's so common, we put blue filter on our flashlights to block the near-IR and IR output; visible light is less damgerous the IR at night!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Everyone is still asleep from their late-saturday-night D&D sessions.
:-)
Give it time...
Will this mod void the warranty?
(it's funny, laugh)
We need a demo of pix of his hot neighbor in her nightgown. Too a HW hacker never sees her that way around sunrise.
--
make install -not war
Will this capture the right range of infra red to detect heat? If so, then I could see using it with a laptop on a cold day to see where I need to improve the insulation on my house.
I unscrewed the lense end - the same way you fine tune the focus.
:(
it then proceeded to fall over due to the usb cable coming free in back.
I now have a little stack of lenses that I need to figure out the proper way to orient.
2 lenses - 2 ways = 8 combinations.
a third lense further out = x2 more combinations.
a fourth lense on the outsite = x2 more combinations.
Total 32 possible ways to re-assemble this little bugger!! DAMN-YOU!!!!
Worst of it is, the pink lense is a lense and not a flat glass filter. I cant use this cam
Anyone have a blow-up of this cam -
Kensington VideoCAM VGA PC Camera
Model#67015
comment directly in my journal
I wonder how long it'll be until someone makes a Ultra Violet webcam :)
"Steals" is such a nasty word. They buy one, figure out how it works and then build it in mass production.
Just claim teh cam will take naked pictures of Paris infrared nakedness and you'll sell the mod not only to geeks, but also to freaks. Watch as they mate and take control of the world !
Wow, but the important part, and hard part to get in most cases, is a good IR lightsource that can illuminate a big enough area, particularly if you want to use a cam like this for security.
Look at these prices though! http://www.nuspectra.com/SearchResult.aspx?Catego
Morphing Software
Like I just did, and spend a minute or two rewiring the IR LED..
And then you can use the IR cam, with a constant IR source and see in the dark, presumably.
But I'll have to wait another few hours to test that.
fortune -o
This guy must just be mad at his ISP or whoever does his hosting.
The ~7MB video file at the end of the page doesn't even have anything to do with IR video. It's like he wants us to take the server down.
So do him a favor and just download it 8 times.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
...Get one here: http://www.mair-family.org/Downloads/ Geoff says the software he had isn't very good. I couldn't find anything I was prepared to pay for so I wrote my own and publish it at that link. Sorry Windows only and WMV output. You can read the feature list for yourself but, in terms of Geoff's difficulty, it will capture frames at between 4s and one hour per-frame (configurable) and create a 15fps WMV.
Go ahead, /. my web server...Hopefully my ISP is tolerant.
Server seems to be working fine......
Nice weather for penguins...
I usually prefer to use a high intensity Xenon light with a filter on the front. Xenon has a nice spike in intensity at about 700nM and makes an awesome covert searchlight.
We all know the real point of this - to let you see through clothes like the infrared video cameras that came out a few years ago.
It's "It's" not "Its"! :)
toresbe
Didn't Sony have an issue a few years back with their digital camera's seeing through bathing suits? Wasn't it have something to do with IR?
Was their fix to add IR filters?
RTFM? FTFM!!
...a stero camera hack that used VI and near IR -- then you could write a driver to output funky composite, layered image formats like the remote sensing applications use in GIS...
or maybe I like image formats to much.
Or just accelerate your webcam enough (toward the object you wish to photograph) to blue-shift the infra-red into the visible frequencies. Put it on a really-high-speed ferris wheel or merry-go-round and synchronise the snapshots to its rotation if you want to keep it "stationary". Compensating for the doppler shift in the signal from the camera is left as an exercise for the reader. But no disassembly or modification of the camera needed!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I knew about this, now you all know about this and it makes me feel far less self satisfied and clever now that it's common knowledge.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Where can I get such a light, and such a filter? Hopefully for a reasonable ($100 total) price?
Morphing Software
I bought a sweex webcam like the one in the guide.
Indeed the usb chipset is supported (sn9c103), but the sensor isn't. So I'm sending it off to Italy for Luca the developer, well it's no use to me.
USB webcams can have different sensors within the exact same model, so you never really know when buying one whether it will work for sure.
Hopefully this will change if the USB video standard (similar to firewire video standard), comes about.
In the mean-time think about firewire cameras.
A blog I run for the wealth
£20 all inc. to UK address and of course, working with linux!
A blog I run for the wealth
Hardest part was putting the Logitech QuickCam back together the right way -- because which ever way which part was was quickly forgotten in the process. I didn't have any film handy but the cam now shows security marks on 50 Euro bill quite nicely. The picture is more of black and whitish without the filter. It sees through things.
Now just good lighting. I have a bicycle led-light with individual lences for each led. One of these with proper leds might work nicely as home surveillance system.
But sure was and is fun....much thanks to the author.
Five minutes after I read this I dug out my old IBM PC webcam and started tearing it apart. Five minutes later I had a working IR webcam. Now I want an IR flashlight.
Did it on my QuickCam Pro 3000. The filter was underneath the part that is screwed to the PCB. As the guy from the article says, use blank film (usually at the beginning of every developed roll) for a filter. I used 3 pieces, and it works well. I placed them between the CMOS censor, and the little plastic piece off of the PCB (where the IR filter was). For some reason, when I point my remote at it and press a button, I can see the flash.
Tomorrow on Slashdot, how to turn an ordinary car into a convertible by removing the roof.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
What they did was disable all the camera's exposure control and a few other features when night mode is on. That means that if you try to use the night mode in the day, the image is completely trashed.
There are ways around it, though. The main one is to add an IR-only filter to the camera so that it's dark as if it were night, and to stick one of the switches halfway, or solder it.
Somewhat to my amazement, this actually worked quite well despite my dramatic ineptness with electronics.
.. y'know.. valid somehow.
Pictures are in this thread.
I'd post a pic of the setup.. But I'm ashamed of it. Sellotaping wires to a battery just isn't
fortune -o
Gee, I wonder what the average slashdotter is going to use this for. (link probably not work-safe)
Time will tell. Right now I need a haircut.
Evil people are out to get you.
It's so common, we put blue filter on our flashlights to block the near-IR and IR output; visible light is less damgerous the IR at night!
There are a few natural sources of visible light that can go ignored. Such as a puddle of water reflecting moonlight. Nothing other than human beings should be outputting appreciable amounts of IR and near-IR.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
He was refering to things that can view IR.
Um... You wouldn't be able to buy something like this off the shelf, but you could probably get away with borrowing a xenon bulb from your neighbours audi then get a visible light blocking filter from your camera shop. Thing to keep in mind is not to stare directly into the invisible beam. Or you could just go to and buy a vector beam http://www.global-security-solutions.com/VectorLig ht.htm
I pointed my TV remote at my Logitech webcam and it detected the IR light.
Did the same thing to a Kodak CX6300 and a CX7300; they detected it.
All I need to do is filter the visible light, no screwing around...or unscrewing.
False color means ... what you 'think' red is is represented by something... what you think 'green' is is something... and what you think blue is is something else.
:)
False Color means applying a dye that is proportional to exposure and it may or may not represent reality. Since we have 3 sensitivities (Excluding night vision) we have three discreet channels for image processing at the same time.
Biggest problem: When Green Grass comes out White because it is IR reflective. Thats when analysts have a fit
Took the whole camera apart, removed the optical pass filter from the CMOS chip, replaced it with an IR-PASS filter (rejects lessthan 750nm)... and I have a visible focus / IR sensitive camera.
Great shots, too
1st test shot here: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12473546/
Does anyone know of any consumer-level thermography DV cams? Something like a regular DV cam with audio that you can plug into a Mac or PC through firewire and do standard video editing with. I came across this on the net, but apparently the infra-red attachment costs around 14 thousand dollars (US). I was hoping there was a much cheaper one out there for hobbyists who are interested in the aesthetic quality of the images.
Nifty, but videocameras would be much more interesting. I had an older model JVC that picked up the flashing IR of a TV remote...hmmm.
Congratulations on finding a new way to subtly spam people with your shit advertising.
Well, maybe not so subtle. I'm noticing this more and more around here lately.
With my friend Qume over at Brazi and it was fun. He used an old Intel webcam, simply removed the green plastic filter and had fun taking creepy pictures of his face in IR. The extra film isn't needed, just the film that blocks the IR. Kill all lights, turn on your webcam, and spray your IR remote control all over the room. You'll love the results.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's effectively the same thing as this story but it's about what happens if you just stick the filter on a pair of goggles and use them during bright sunlight.
Nothing. Your eyes aren't sensitive to near-infrared light. But many CCDs in video cameras and digital cameras are.
A 500W Halogen light would probably work (as long as you don't mind all the wasted visible light), as would an array of IR LEDs.
With the Halogen lights, use your IR-modded video camera to look at the shadowed areas, where people would think they're not visible.
A lot of the "star light" sniper scopes use optical amplifiers: a series of plates held at high electrical potentials. When a photon strikes the first plate, it kicks off a few more electrons, which hit the second plate, which kicks off more, and... So these scopes need some sort of light source, star light is enough.
What this guy has done is take advantage of the CCD in the webcam, that most CCDs react quite well to near-IR light, and modifying the camera to filter out the human-eye visible components, leaving the near-IR part to get to the CCD.
So, instead of ripping apart a $500 video recorder, he's done it with a $30 webcam.
Before the Chinese invasion, wasn't Tibet a theocracy where the Dalai Lama held absolute power?
Please note, I am not defending the Chinese. I find their form of Communism and the killing of thousands of Tibetians to be despicable. But, the idea of fighting them to restore a regime where one person has absolute control and the citizens have no rights doesn't sound like a "freedom fight" to me.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Google turned up a very fine article on digital IR photography that lists specific visible light filters.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I'm scared to release the source, though I have thought about it a lot. It's mostly hubris that stops me, plus I'd like to avoid the inevitable abuse about my style and suggestions about how to implement it "properly" ;-) It's hard knowing which kudos to chase: the prospective employer with a million dollar offer for someone that can do this work; or the community. I'm a utopian with a family to feed. As an "anonymous coward" poster you might understand me being a named coward.
The DirectX SDK has some very good Direct Show examples and I used them for the source to real-time display parts of WebCam. There's a little filter builder test tool in the DirectX SDK that lets you chain elements to see what goes together to connect a source to a window.
WMV was an absolute bitch. The examples in the SDK are just rubbish and I ended up doing bizarre things like writing a program to dump the entire state for all of the installed Windows Media profiles in order to find out some of the undocumented properties that are effectively necessary for decent results. The default profiles are fine if you are using "Windows Movie Maker" but not for reasonably configurable applications.
GDI+, OTOH, is just fabulous (to program with). It's pretty well documented and examples aren't really necessary due to its simplicity. Though it's not without its own stupid behaviours, e.g. inability to construct an object to create an EXIF tag (though I haven't looked into whether or not that's just a feature of the .NET framework GDI+ interfaces). One of the other apps on my downloads, Thumber, heavily uses GDI+. That introduced me to another SDK that is just rubbish: the Canon SDK for the RAW image format from its digital SLRs. It's functional but gives very poor access to files.
Anyway, I'd prefer not to publish the source but you can always mail me and I'll discuss the elements of it and address any questions. Send mail to the dmair mailbox in the mair-family dot org domain.
I have a trust spacecam, a very cheapo thingy. I removed this IR filter and reassembled the entire thing within 2 minutes. Didn't put a visible light filter in though. :)
Because I don't immediately have a remote control lying around here we are smoking cigarettes in the dark to generate IR light, with the cam on. Very cool effect! Very scary faces when taking a puff...
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
We give the nightvision goggles to pro-capitalism fighters.
Wouldn't giving be communist? I think you mean SELL to the pro-capitalism fighters. That would be the capitalist thing to do.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
For those who think I'm making a non-sequitor, this fellow, or someone with a similar bent, always used to find some way to work in the nuns being sexually assaulted, usually with the item of discussion.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.