Need to see colors in the dark?

“INFRARED DETECTORS: EMCCD and sCMOS imaging systems confront color night vision” published in laser Focus World, February 2013, describes advances in camera technology that make this possible.

Security applications are the main market, where flooding a scene with IR eliminates all color information, but I can see the development work having spinoffs for regular machine vision too. In particular, there’s the issue of dealing with, or expanding, dynamic range. Even in well constrained industrial settings I still find this to be an issue, and not just for looking at weld pools: bright surfaces are sometimes inevitable, making it very hard to find an optimum contrast.

If you’re interested in learning where cameras are headed, take a look at the article.