If you can change your vision to thermal spectrum range, will you do it? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Jenny
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 01:58:18 pm
content: Just a relax talkAssuming the FOV and resolution remain the same as your normal eyes.Also, will you choose MWIR or LWIR?

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 01:59:38 pm
content: My monitor would look very boring.

author: indeterminatus
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 02:02:37 pm
content: If that would be a permanent option to pick, no. If I could hop between different ranges, yes.

author: Vipitis
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 02:22:39 pm
content: while the biology behind this is interesting, there is a good reason why nothing on this planet as "thermal eyes" and it is water.You lose a lot of fidelity by going monochrome and darkness wouldn't exist. I am sure our ancestors would do this or people that lost their eyesight(replace by low res thermal). But it is more utilitarian for active predators than humans using stuff like printed books, phone screens etc.lovely paper on the a simulation to how some snakes "see" thermal:https://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/210/16/2801.full.pdf

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 03:56:11 pm
content: Speaking of biology, i do not want toseepeople farting.

author: calel
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 03:58:23 pm
content: you meanonlythermal (no more visible light)? you kiddingthough on the plus side every woman would look hot

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 05:42:03 pm
content: I would love to add spectrum, but would never switch full on to IR. All signage, art, clothing and other aesthetic material is designed for our existing spectrum.Your question throws physical reality out the window since similar performance can't be achieved in the same size package. So its a fun what if game. Since I am opting for added spectrum I want it all. UV, Near IR, Mid IR, LW IR. All with switchable/variable gain so I can make any spectrum, including visible, dominant and also be able to play with different combinations. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I guess the real over the top question is how much spectral resolution I would like to have. Again, why not ask for the moon and have the option of turning our eyes into portable spectrometers.

author: calel
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 06:25:38 pm
content: it's possible the OP meant IR as an extra option not alternative to visible lighta bit like the Yautja aliens

author: Dark Volter
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 23, 2020, 11:49:53 pm
content: Quote from: calel on September 23, 2020, 06:25:38 pmI am pretty sure the Yautja Predators see only in Infrared though, so that is their only option!(They use the bio mask to see other bands at will, which probably includes Visible)Quote from: Bud on September 23, 2020, 03:56:11 pmWould this even work? That's not something you see in longwave infrared- it'd take, what , a narrow slice of the midwave band, and it'd have to stand out? Not sure this would really be a thing, might require holding up a narrow bandpass filter in front of your eyes to really see...(like how midwaves can see gas leaking from gas stationsor thishttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.htmlit took gas detection cameras with certain bands visible and the rest of the midwave area not visible to really bring gasses out

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 03:15:16 am
content: Quote from: Bud on September 23, 2020, 03:56:11 pmIn daytime you probably would want to avoid using a 2.8-3.0 micrometer filter on your fancy broadband eyeballs.While the fantasy goes on, how about adding LIDAR vision with say 3 cm range resolution and a few dozen meters of range.Of course with all these optical inputs we are going to have to graft on a couple of extra occipital lobes to process all the information.

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 09:19:09 am
content: Quote from: Dark Volter on September 23, 2020, 11:49:53 pmWhile MWIR is still easily the best for methane, methane is just visible on some LWIR cameras. There is a big absorption band at 7µm which can be just in the passband with the right coatings on sensor and lens.https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C74828&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPECA lot is going against it. The low energy from an ambient scene at 7µm compared to the rest of the band being the worst.

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 11:14:57 am
content: I have often wondered about seeing in different wavebands - I suspect that's why I've equipped myself with gear that can convert different frequencies into something that I can perceive with my eyes. Would I want to swap my present eyes for a different band? No, but if I could augment my present senses with additional bands I'd have a good think about it.I have looked at the world in LWIR, MWIR, NIR, UV and X-Ray I can fairly confidently say that most of the 'useful' information is packed into that small sliver of spectrum we refer to as 'visible light'. Next up is probably near-UV, and there are many species of insect, bird and (weirdly) fish that can perceive UV, some as a '4th colour' and others in conjunction with a smaller selection of lower visible bands.Once you move to near-IR (from 'just below dark red' to about 1.1µm), you find there aren't really any 'colours' in the way we perceive them. Sure, some things are brighter or darker in those bands - the sky is black and foliage is bright - but I haven't generally noticed much difference between, say, 1100-900µm and 900-750µm. There will be odd instances of course but nothing like a peacock's feathers, a butterfly's wings or a garden full of flowers. I am not aware of any organism that has evolved particular sensitivity to those bands.MWIR is a wide band and does have some interest, as there are a number of things that have sharp absorbencies within that range. It might be interesting to be able to see in that band but it'd have to be split into multiple separate 'colours' to be useful. Again, nothing I'm aware of has any senses in that band.LWIR, again, is only slightly interesting. Yes, you can tell the temperature of household objects and could, probably, map different sub-bands to (say) R, G and B - but mostly all you'd see is that hotter things were bluer. Would this be more useful than our thermal cameras that just show hotter things as brighter? I don't know. It is interesting to know that a few organisms can - to a limited extent - 'see' in LWIR. Some snakes have specialised thermal receptors that let them detect prey. And, of course, you'll be well aware that your own skin has some thermal reception capability - your face can easily detect from some inches the thermal radiation from, say, a really fresh cup of tea. Hotter things like bonfires can be sensed much further away.I haven't thought much about looking at lower frequencies than LWIR, though there might be some interesting stuff there if today's relatively primitive experiments with terahertz radiation are anything to go by. Below that and you're into radio of various sorts. I wonder what an electromagnetically-sensitive alien would make of our planet's incredible level of noise in the RF spectrum.Back up now to UV and beyond. Yes, flowers look different in UV, as many include patterns that have co-evolved with pollinators' eyes to guide those insects to the 'good bits'. A very few humans can see by near-UV; there is a rare genetic condition that adds sensitivity to a fourth colour and an also-rare eye condition where the lens is missing, thus allowing UV to reach the retina (the lens is fairly opaque to UV and thus helps protect our retinas from damage).Moving up the spectrum brings us into 'vacuum-UV', so-called because it won't propagate in air due to heavy absorption and would thus probably be useless as a visual sense.Then you start getting into soft X-Rays. These would let you see through some less-dense things. As the energies increase to, say, 50keV you reach the area where you look right through skin and see skeletons - that's where medical imaging lives. But there aren't that many natural X-Ray emitters on our planet so even if you could see that range it would be pretty dark. But lift your (very sensitive) X-Ray eyes to the heavens and it would be a different story: there are numerous huge X-Ray emitters across the vastness of space so the night (and day?) sky would look very different. (As an aside, there are also things to see in the universe at other wavelengths from radio upwards; I just conveniently skipped over them in the earlier parts of this muse).X-Raye give way to alpha, beta and gamma radiation, all of which have increasing penetrative power. If you wanted to be able to look straight through (say) a large ship or deep into the ground then gamma-ray vision would be quite interesting I suspect. But for everyday use you'd simply see straight through day-to-day objects - and anyway, many would be damaged by the sorts of levels of gamma radiation necessary to form any kind of useful image.So there we have it: as far as I know there's quite a lot of 'nothing to be seen here' across the spectrum. Most life has evolved to use the same tiny sliver of 'visible light'. Even when you look at things like deep-water lantern fish, which inhabit depths where daylight can't penetrate and create their own light to lure prey - they light up in the same spectrum we see in. I can't imagine there's any reason to have prevented their biology from evolving to produce, say, IR or UV light (and the prey to have similar sensitivity), but that's just not how it is.I think my final conclusion is that if we had a set of terminals on the side of our heads that let us bolt on supplementary wavelength sensors I'd probably go for a wide-range LWIR-to-near IR option - but as I can't envisage anything like that happening soon I'll happily stick to my toys and the Mk 1 eyeball.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 11:58:55 am
content: Ultrapurple,It has already been done...... The Borg ! They bolt on eye enhancements and implants to provide an optical advantage over their enemiesOh hold on a minute, they are just the product of a writer for Star TrekHuman augmentation with technology can be a scary topic but science is coming up with some very clever ideas and techniques to give sight back to the blinds etc. Again, on the Star Trek front, Geordi La Forge is blind and has a visor coupled to his brain that can see in various wavelengths. I see multi spectral visors as a very real possibility as the Military have uses for such equipment on the battlefieldWhen thinking about enhanced ‘vision’, imagine being able to see sound and radio frequencies ! An ability to see sound would enable precision navigation to a target that is creating an acoustic signature. People have already built acoustic ‘torches’ to trace sounds to source.None of this is that far fetched but the challenge has always been to find a low risk way to communicate augmentation outputs to the required areas of the brain. Drilling holes in people’s heads to insert wire probes is not something to be taken lightly by the surgeon or the patient ! The brain has an amazing capacity to adapt to change and theoretically it could adapt to additional ‘data’ inputs and could learn how to process that data.I remember seeing an article on a completely bling chap who used a vision augmentation system that used cameras as his eyes and fed the produced Low resolution image data to a multi pixel plate that was sat on his tongue. His brain interpreted the electrical tingles from the tongue plate pixels as an image ! Low resolution yes, but it gave him a form of sight for navigation using a sense that could be taught to act as a vision receptor in place of the optic nerve and brains normal image processing centre. We also have hearing aid devices that couple to the brain directly and low resolution retina implants so science is taking baby steps towards the Borg approach to enhancing a human.Interesting stuff

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 12:02:00 pm
content: Here is a video of a blind chap using the tongue vision device for the first time. An interesting watchhttps://youtu.be/D1ehHIGzmPcNews item on the systemhttps://youtu.be/48evjcN73rwIn theory the data input to the system could be any form of imager, be it visible light, IR, UV or thermalThis could potentially be recreated by a clever hobbyistFraser

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 12:09:07 pm
content: Artificial Retina implants...... Early days, but.....https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/artificial-retina-implantsFraser

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 01:48:27 pm
content: @Fraser - Good points and useful references as always: thanks.I dimly remember hearing about someone completely blind who had some sort of electrode matrix implanted to stimulate directly their optic nerve. Again, the resolution was low (think 8x8) and the first job was to work out the 'wiring' so that the 'pixels' lit up in some sensible sort of order, somewhat like a dot matrix display. I am stretching the back of my memory for this but I have a feeling it was more than ten years ago.I understand that a fair proportion of research is carried out on people who have lost their sight, perhaps in one eye due to cancer, but still have parts of the 'vision plumbing' working. Given informed consent, it's considered ethically reasonable to wire someone's eyeball up to a computer if they're definitely going to lose it soon anyway.A colleague of mine is facing something comparable with their hearing. A tumour has been detected on the link between one ear and the brain. The surgeon can remove the tumour cleanly - and has already done hundreds of successful similar operations - but the patient loses their hearing in that ear because the nerves are unavoidably severed. I suspect if my colleague was asked to participate in some kind of hearing research project using that ear before the cancer surgery they would be happy to co-operate (always assuming it didn't involve complications for the 'main show'), knowing that hearing a few computer-controlled odd buzzes in the doomed ear was contributing towards helping increase our knowledge.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 02:02:10 pm
content: Oxford Eye and Kings College Hospitals 2012.... 1500 pixelshttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17936302Fraser

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 02:09:43 pm
content: 2009....https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1231172/Blind-man-fitted-bionic-eye-sees-time-30-years.htmlFraser

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 02:58:44 pm
content: Thanks Fraser - and I'm glad you managed to find examples from 10 years ago, thus validating my hazy memories!The interesting thing, from my point of view, is that there doesn't appear to have been a massive leap forward either in capabilities or of the basic devices becoming commonplace. I find it hard to believe that there has been no further research in a decade.One day I hope we'll see some kind of light-powered vision chip that can be implanted at the end of an optic nerve and incorporate either a camera or artificial retina (depending on the state of the eye) and provide a usable degree of vision.I don't believe I'm alone in this dream.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 03:38:48 pm
content: While I agree with ultra purple that the vast majority of information we we are interested in is in the visual, there are obvious benefits to the other bands. It is why so much equipment is now available. The two most obvious are the ability to see when the big torch in the sky is on the other side of the planet, and better ability to see when smoke or fog are around.Perhaps the best analogy, color blind people do quite well without the extra information provided by fully operable cone cells. But the rest of us value that so much that it drove the development of a complete upgrade to the television system.As an aside, the population of people who can see the near UV used to be quite large as it included all those who had cataract surgery. Now that such surgery includes a lens replacement I assume that the replacement lens blocks the near UV, but I don't really know. Those I know who had the old surgery never mentioned any benefits other than being able to see coating leaks on fluorescent bulbs.

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 03:44:01 pm
content: My mother had cataract surgery in her early 80s and the first thing she said was how all the blue colourss were so much more vibrant. I suspect it's because of something like Rayleigh scattering in the cataract - but she really loved the new, bluer skies.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 05:27:01 pm
content: My father reported the same after he had new lenses fitted in his eyes. He said everything was so much crisper and a slight yellow cast was gone. I believe the ageing of the humans natural lens can lead to a yellowing and so filtration of light entering it. He particularly mentioned the brighter blues he saw after the replacement. Whilst on the topic of replacing lenses in the human eye, it us getting very high tech these days with single distance (normally requiring the person to wear reading glasses) and multiple distance lenses ! I think, but I am not sure, that a complex lens shape provides good focus at different distances to different parts of the retina and the brain selects the clearest inage received and ignores the out of focus areas. I think the focus zones are concentric rings around the main central focus area. All. Lever stuff but the brain does take some time to make sense of the changes to its imaging input characteristics.Fraser

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 24, 2020, 07:11:14 pm
content: The strangest effect is when working in a (former) photo-etch area which has yellow tint / lighting. You very quickly get used to the colour cast, but stepping back outside into the 'purple-land' of normal lighting is very odd.For me it only lasted a few minutesBill

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 25, 2020, 07:55:24 am
content: At Tate Modern last year one floor of the elevator lobby was illuminated with bright, essentially monochromatic light (sodium yellow I think) and it gave the very curious effect of black-and-white vision - one rapidly 'tuned out' the yellowness but of course there was no other colour.Sainsbury's (a major UK supermarket chain) has a corporate identity based on an orange colour. Unfortunately this means that their name is invisible on posters illuminated by sodium lighting.

author: bap2703
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2020, 07:15:40 pm
content: There are also colour engineered lighting in supermarkets around vegetables/fruits/meat.These really fuck up vision.I wonder if some people have the equivalent of absolute pitch but for vision.For the original question: I wear (glass) glasses so I'd be pretty annoyed by having a LWIR vision. Plus that unmovable HTI logo in the corner would be annoying

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 26, 2020, 09:36:45 pm
content: The lighting for the underground garden at Cruachan Power Station is also pretty weird to see.(Cruachan is a pump-storage hydro scheme buried inside a mountain in Scotlandhttps://www.visitcruachan.co.uk)

author: Jenny
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 28, 2020, 12:51:33 pm
content: Thank you everyone, you made this thread much more interesting than I thought it would be!

author: Bill W
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2020, 02:56:37 pm
content: Here is a slightly different take on the original posting, what if your eyes used the visible spectrum like a thermal camera ?Here is the well known image of the 18th green at St Andrews Old Course, but in 'red hot'.Normal colour image converted to luminance/greyscaleGreyscale then converted to thermal paletteBill

author: angelortega
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2020, 11:23:19 pm
content: for me i would like regular visible all the way across swir. but these two seem to need some type of active light. now to get pass this problem, i would like some low percent of mwir all the way lwir . so if the light go out it would act as a backup

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2020, 05:11:32 am
content: Since this is all in the realm of science fiction, I think I would prefer the ability to see flickering of light well into the GHz (and be able to control it at will, so that cheap LED lights don't drive me crazy) and decode the information encoded into it. At the same time, some fast way to get information out (at the rate of up to a few Gbps) would be an even bigger game changer, although I'm not sure what form I would like that to be in - perhaps in the form of low level RF or magnetic fields from the chest area since that's a good place for wearable electronics?Quote from: calel on September 23, 2020, 03:58:23 pmYou'll find some hotter than others. In particular, you'll have an easy time telling which of the skinny ladies diet excessively to maintain their figure and which ones have a high thermal dissipation.

author: Ultrapurple
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 08:01:53 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on October 01, 2020, 05:11:32 amThat's an interesting assertion. I've never noticed that sort of thing, although I must admit I don't tend to hang around supermodels much. Care to expand on it? (I think perhaps in a new thread rather than hijacking this one).

author: LaserSteve
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 05:54:51 pm
content: Dating would not be fun, ever seen a teenage girl's face in Longwave Thermal? Worse yet, UV ?In longwave, one of the things that is interesting is a sometimes lack of symmetry in faces if your camera is sensitive enough. It seems Collagen is not always uniformly distributed.I used to give tours of a lab, to hundreds of school kids each summer, and one of our toys was made by Raytheon... Inevitably one young lady would turn and verbally blast some other young lady over some IR facial feature in each group. Sometimes resulting in tears. Yours truly started giving a gentle warning about not interpreting the images before gating the shutter open.Hint: On a thermal grayscale your potential GF/Wife can sometimes look like a leopard.... In a few cases, something even worse...Boys did not seem to have the pronounced gradients.To a small extent, in the winter we could tell who was outside in the last 20 minutes, and athletes could be a little different in the images.There is also an anecdotal story going around in the imaging community about young ladies lighting up in the 30 Terahertz range when attracted to a boy. Accidently found while using a pair of grad students as a test target.Steve

author: calel
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 10:56:58 pm
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on October 01, 2020, 05:11:32 amwait so the "naturally hot" ones would be literally hotter than the ones on a diet? would regular low end-mid end cams (like Ex or Exx) be able to pick up the differences between varying basal metabolic rates?Quote from: LaserSteve on October 02, 2020, 05:54:51 pmI imagine it's worse with gingers then (the real ones with the freckles)

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 03:37:59 am
content: Quote from: Ultrapurple on September 25, 2020, 07:55:24 amBack in 1971, when I spent some time in the UK, the road rules had just changed to "dipped beams" in metropolitan areas, instead of "parking lights" only, but motorists were taking a while to get used to this in Southampton, where people were a bit more "laid back" than the bigger cities.I remember one day, nearly getting run over by a taxi on a crosswalk.The dark blue vehicle virtually disappeared under the Sodium lamps, & with no headlights, was very hard to see.He probably had the same problem with my clothes!A few years later, back for a week, I dropped in for a visit at a fish 'n chip shop I used to frequent in the same city, (anybody from SOTON remember the "Golden Chippy", up the road from the railway station?).Leaving my hiredpinkFord Cortina in a car park, I strolled down, & talked to the owners for a while.During this time, night fell, so when I came back to pick up the car, I couldn't initially find it------there was ayellowCortina, though!Luckily, the keys had the rego number written on the tag!

author: cejoba
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 01:15:17 pm
content: A real experiment:His first camera looks really good, wonder what model it is?

author: ArsenioDev
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 04:26:26 pm
content: That's a Tau 2, looks to be a Vue submodel

author: svgurus
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 05:08:25 pm
content: Quote from: Ultrapurple on September 25, 2020, 07:55:24 amMost likely, it was Olafur Elliason's "yellow corridor", attached pictures are from it in Moscow) this exhibition also showed Richard Mosse's "Grid(Moria)" video installation, made with his favorite military grade lwir/mwir toys. I laughed so hard when they called them "special military cameras" in description, without mentioning "thermal"

author: svgurus
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 07:24:50 pm
content: Quote from: ArsenioDev on October 15, 2022, 04:26:26 pmIts Flir vue pro, most likely 640 9mm model, the small-step cone surrounding germanuim lens and single digit in focal length number are quite distinctive) resolution is quite lousy, because video goes through analog output. the camera died most likely because of overvoltage - it has no overvoltage/reverse polarity protection when used without hdmi adapter like in attached picture. i didnt use such models but powering issues were one of things that kept me from buying them. or maybe prolonged overheating was the problem, it sits near his hot elbow and is surrounded by other gearBack to original question - i wouldn't trade regular eyes for thermal vision, even after watching predator/riddick moviesBut i know a girl who saw my lwir photos from party we both attended and said she would like such a camera built in an eye if there was an opportunity) I decided not to disappoint her by telling that mine heats up to ~30 deg above ambient

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 09:56:27 pm
content: One of the most common uses of alternate viewing spectrum is the use of vertically polarized glasses for driving. Those who have used these these know that they give dramatically reduced glare off of roadways, windshields and water. And make it impossible to read LCD displays on gas pumps and other places, including the dash instruments on some vehicles. Any spectral band has advantages and drawbacks

author: tske
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 04:02:21 pm
content: Quote from: Ultrapurple on September 24, 2020, 11:14:57 amYour information is really interesting.I have always feel LWIR cameras have less details than visible light cameras (people in Reply #34 cannot even do daily tasks well with thermal only), and I used to think it's because of the thermal technology is still premature comparing to visible light cameras. But now I'm thinking maybe LWIR contains less fine details physically?Let's assume we have two ideal cameras, one sees visible light and another sees MWIR/LWIR, both are able to count individual photons, thus infinitely sensitive, and both are monochrome. Who will win by detail level? (Excluding those artificial things like screen contents, signs, books, etc.)

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2025, 11:32:37 pm
content: Quote from: tske on May 30, 2025, 04:02:21 pmThermal cameras are readily available with angular resolution better than human vision, and with pixel counts large enough to fill the field that humans really process at one time. The answer to this is complicated and hinted at in prior posts. First, there is surprisingly little in the world that isn't artificial in some sense. The vast majority of the vegetation has evolved to take advantage of solar radiation which has peak power in the solar band. The creatures that use eyes for the most part also use this band because more power is available. So all of the signaling and camouflages tend to work best in bands in or near visible.But there are flip sides to this. Warm blooded animals are far easier to detect in the LWIR than in the visible in all but relatively contrived circumstances (White cat in a lighted coal bin). Few if any creatures have evolved intentional LWIR camouflage. I suspect, based on theory and limited experience seeing women using LWIR equipment, that the mottling mentioned in prior posts reflects emissivity differences (and possibly temperature differences) due to uneven application of makeup. Women spend a lot of time painting their faces both to cover perceived flaws and to enhance desirable features. But the materials used for this are evaluated only in the visible band and have different thermal conductivity than skin.All in all my experience is that you can figure out what is going on around you approximately as well with LWIR imagery as you can with a similar monochrome image. There are circumstances that tilt the balance one way or the other. Arctic cold penalizes LWIR. Fog and smoke penalizes the visible. This equivalence also depends on spending quite a bit of time learning/familiarizing yourself with the LWIR imagery. There is much more to the human vision system than the sensor. When you effectively put a band shifter to convert IR into visible before it hits the retina some retraining of the post-processing steps is needed. The monochrome visible stuff takes far less time for people with normal color vision to adapt.

author: tske
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 01:54:36 pm
content: Thank you for the insight.So, what sensitivity do you guys think is enough to show a scene similar to a mono visible light camera?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 02:44:25 pm
content: Very subjective, but a 640x480 camera with 100 mK MRT will be very satisfying. Improvements become less noticeable as you go below 50 mK. That is also where price increases rapidly and availability starts to drop. If cost is no object and you face no legal barriers you can get below 20 mK (scene limited) and there are some cases where it helps. Webb telescope is an example

author: tske
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 03:12:41 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on May 31, 2025, 02:44:25 pmIMHO the current mainstream 50mk ones are way lower than my expectation. I wonder if anyone did a side-by-side comparison? But to me they look much less detailed than a monochrome visible light camera. I'm expecting maybe some future technology with 1mk sensitivity will reveal more details from MWIR/LWIR band?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2025, 05:19:49 pm
content: Quote from: tske on May 31, 2025, 03:12:41 pmDon't confuse sensitivity with resolution. The biggest difference between thermal and visual is resolution. 640 x 480 is huge in consumer/industrial thermal cameras, while it is pretty much the lowest acceptable for visible cameras. But you are right, there are scenes where better sensitivity would help.It is hard to make fair comparisons. The scenes where more sensitivity helps are usually low temp, or late night when thermal differences due to daytime heating have settled out, or rainy and/or foggy situations which have thermally leveled the scene. But in many of those cases without artificial illumination the visible image is also of poor quality. Which goes back to the original subject of this thread. In my mind the visible is overall slightly better, even compared to monochrome visible. I wouldn't switch but would love to have both. Even though the thermal specifications that could be packed in a human sized eye wouldn't approach the comparable performance I am describing.