Thursday, December 17, 2009

Infrared Security Cameras: The Pinnacle of Home Security Surveillance Technology

By Jeffrey Parker

Infrared cameras were first used in the forests of Korea, and were instrumental tools for US soldiers seeking out enemy infantry skilled in the art of stealth and concealment amidst the trees. Since then, the devices have found application in fields as diverse as archaeology, building inspection and astronomy. Incidentally, the infrared security camera has become the absolute cream of home security surveillance technology.

There's a fair amount of confusion regarding infrared security cameras, as many people erroneously associate the term with so-called 'night vision' security cameras. Night vision cameras utilize the World War II technology of night glasses, which use a large diameter objective along with numerous lenses to amplify light up to levels six or seven times greater than would normally be perceived by the human eye. Alternatively, some of them use so-called 'active infrared', whereby the camera is equipped with a torch which provides illumination just below the wavelength visible to the human eye, while the camera's lens is a CCD lens sensitive to light on this wavelength.

Both these designs are known for producing images of inferior quality. Much of the time, the resultant footage is monochromatic, fuzzy and about as clear as the imagery you'd expect from a video game console in the 1980s.

True infrared security cameras do not provide any illumination of their own. Instead, they read and record the black body radiation of objects. This radiation is brought about by the heat emitted by objects, and as such can be detected totally independently of lighting conditions by use of the camera's microbolometer. Of course, the imagery they produce doesn't look much like ordinary video footage - it's not going to tell you the color of a person's hair, skin or clothes. What it will do is assist you in determining their height, build and gender, what they did and where they might have left any traceable evidence such as fingerprints. What's more, adding this state of the art technology to your home security surveillance system needn't force you into completely rewiring your pad. The existence of wireless surveillance cameras of the infrared type means that you can have any footage captured transmitted to a remote location, and thereby uploaded to a storage cluster online, where you can view it through a private website.

Infrared security cameras can be an invaluable addition to homes where poor outdoor lighting conditions render ordinary wireless surveillance cameras insufficient. While their images might be hard for a layperson to interpret, they provide what, for a skilled thermographic analyst, amounts to full-spectrum coverage.

The thing to guide you in your decision as to whether to purchase what can be a rather expensive piece of audio-visual equipment (thermal cameras from FLIR, the major producer of the technology, start at around $2000) should really be need. External infrared security cameras will be totally unnecessary in neighborhoods with well-lit streets, as they will be on porches or driveways with motion-activated lighting.

There is, of course, also a cost-saving element to infrared security cameras. All you need to do is have your infrared security cameras set up in such a way that they alert the fire department when the ambient temperature in your home rises above a certain level, and they can double as fire detectors, eliminating the need for a smoke detection system.

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