"Starlight", "Black Light", "AI Super Low Light", and "Aurora", these concepts seem to be more popular in the security industry than "low-light cameras" themselves.
Regardless of the marketing name, they all boil down to different methods of enabling cameras to capture more day-like images at night.
In addition to the night vision infrared cameras that we often used in projects, HD night vision cameras also have starlight, black light, and full-color cameras.
1. Infrared camera
The infrared night vision camera is mainly used in a dark environment with no visible light or low light, and uses an infrared lamp to actively project infrared light onto the object. The infrared light enters the lens after being reflected by the object for imaging. This imaging method and technology is the most mature, it is used most in actual intelligent projects, and its cost performance is also very high. It has become the most commonly used night vision camera application solution.
Divided according to the infrared irradiation distance, the industry has three different types of single lamp, double lamp, and dot matrix infrared. Generally, the night vision irradiation distance of a single lamp is about 30 meters, and the night vision irradiation distance of a double lamp is about 50 meters. The video screen of infrared night vision is black and white, and the image is easily limited by the irradiation distance of the infrared light. In some special shooting scenes, details such as faces and license plates may be unclear.
License plate reflective infrared overexposure
Infrared night vision camera
2. Starlight camera
From the functional classification of the camera, the star-level camera is a kind of low-light camera. A low-light camera refers to a picture that can still display clear and colorful images under low light intensity. According to the illuminance, starlight can be divided into starlight and superstarlight cameras. Generally, it can maintain a full-color picture under an illumination of 0.01Lux, which is called starlight; it can still maintain a full-color picture under a low-light environment with an illuminance of 0.001lux. For super starlight.
Hikvision 200W Pixel Starlight Camera
Hikvision 400W Pixel Camera Starlight
Dahua camera management
3. Black light camera
The concept of the black light camera was originally proposed by Hikvision. Compared with starlight, the night vision effect is better. The dual Sensor architecture, based on the principle of human eye bionics, optimizes the processing ability of the color and brightness of the picture, and effectively improves the low-light at night. The monitoring effect of the illumination environment realizes an excellent visual experience of color images.
hikvision black light camera
4. Full color camera
In low-light scenes, the black and white night vision effect of ordinary cameras is poor, and the deterrence is not enough. The full-color camera adopts a large aperture, and the clearance is more sufficient. Regulatory mechanism. The soft light can not only supplement the light for the camera at night, but also illuminate, which effectively plays a warning and deterrent role. The night vision imaging effect of the full-color camera is better.
In general, a star-level camera usually refers to a camera that can still display clear color images in a low-light environment with only starlight and without any auxiliary light source. The so-called starlight level illuminance is about 0.01Lux to 0.001Lux, and the illuminance on a clear moonlit night is about 0.1 to 0.01Lux.
Similarly, "Super Starlight" and "Black Light" reduce the illumination again. Generally speaking, when the illuminance is below 0.001Lux, it is "super starlight", and when the illuminance is 0Lux, it is "black light". The "night vision" of starlight cameras is mainly optimized through multiple hardware dimensions such as lens, aperture, image sensor and fill light. The lens and aperture limit the light transmission and light entry capabilities respectively, while the image sensor uses the light sensitivity and the fill light enhances the low-light capability of the camera through the fill light capability.
- Starlight night vision uses infrared radiation to irradiate objects , and the infrared rays reflected by the object are collected on the pixel tube (EPM ) through the lens to generate pixel brightness values, which are processed by signal processing, amplification, filtering, etc., and finally converted into grayscale images. This illumination method is different from other night vision technologies and provides a clearer image.