Color night vision test...

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Frangible

Enlightened
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
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I just got a Gen 2 night vision monocular.

I took a cheap red, green, and blue filter, took 3 pics with my digital camera for each color, then combined them into color channels on my PC. I also took an unfiltered image, which is brighter because it has infrared light.

UNFILTERED:
original.jpg


COMBINED COLOR IMAGE:
color_hybrid.jpg


My equip and setup doing this was terrible. If you had real lenses instead of the jury-rigged crap I used, and had a camera adapter, I'm sure you'd get *much* better results.

But, it's sort of a proof of concept -- it works.
 
That's pretty cool, but the subject appears to be a white house with black roof. How about trying that on something that has more different colors in it?
 
I might try again, but it's really hard to get the camera to even take a picture due to the autofocus and trying to hold it in position.

Also my filters were terrible... red/blue were a pair of cardboard 3d glasses, and green was a piece of green tinted plastic that was a lid to something.
 
I looked at you pics a while back but it didn't dawn on me until now that Gen. 2 is sooo much better than what I played with in the military back in the old days. The old starlight scopes were just crap compared to your pic. And OBTW, I like the homemade filter shots.
 
I just tried this again, looking out of my driveway, with a large red box in the center. Unfortunately, it is overcast with little moon, and due to camera jitter it was blurry and didn't look very good. I'll try again when there's more moonlight.

I can see fine with just the scope with this lighting, but when you cut the IR out and just use the visible spectrum, the brightness goes down a *lot*.
 
Wow, these are really cool pictures! I'm only beginning to seriously study photography, so night images are fascinating to me.
 
Another. This one is crappy though.

Original:
colornv_2a.jpg


Color combine:
colornv_2b.jpg


In the foreground is a box of dog treats primarily a bright red in color, as you can see, the color information was lost. I think maybe my lenses just suck. (3D glasses for red+blue, plastic lid for green)
 
I applaud your inginuity, but as you've discovered, the idea behind NV is to maximise the gain, primarily by using a wide spectrum and combining them into one colour.

AFAIK, colour cameras work (or used to work) in the same way by splitting the beam into 3 colours. All you get by filtering is a picture from a high-efficiency camera. But then you lose the efficiency because no filter combination is 100% efficient.

Someone was talking about military NV:

I remember at a CCF open day at the Devon and Dorset Regiment, using a broad spectrum IR camera, with a coolant cannister mounted on top. That was wonderful; not vision enhancing, but true Predator-style IR (though all in orange). You could see warm bodies and a warm car. Awesome.

On another occasion, in Berlin, just after the wall fell, I went on a NV buying trip. I picked up a ex-stasi hald-held for £70 (equivalent) that worked pretty well for a basic cold-war era 1st gen toy. I nearly bought an active IR scope out of a car boot, but the buyer wanted me to test it in daylight only and the illuminator was N/F.

That was the last time I dealy with NV; I bet things have come on a long way since then.
 
I like the pics very much. One thing you might want to try. I have a Fulton MX/991 Anglehead flashlight. Picked it up for $9 at the local Army/Navy store. It comes with red and blue filters. Would be an excuse for you to pick up another light /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif And it would serve multaple purposes. Got better filters and another flashlight to mod /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
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