Jump to content
UltravioletPhotography

LWIR panoramas, tech notes and a photo


Recommended Posts

First, here's my hometown of Brighton, MA (which I have done before, with the old camera, but now we have better detail):

post-94-0-35050600-1516394243.jpg

 

Tech notes on producing LWIR panoramas with FLIRs:

1) exiftool can extract the RAW to a TIFF file, which solves a lot of problems and greatly improves the quality

2) Photoshop actions allow batch processing of the histograms, and also stitching.

3) I have edited the image in the usual way, adjusting contrast, curves, etc. for optimal looks, which means that while brightness still corresponds to temperature, it's NOT linear, so twice as bright is not the same as twice as warm (or any similar notion you might have).

Link to comment

Side-to-side is Washington. Not sure about the cross street. And yes, E60.

 

so is this the main downtown brighton area? are the trolley tracks gone??

Link to comment

Yes, and gone since the 70s or 80s I think.

 

damn.. dates me.. i used to live there as a student for awhile.

 

there were electric overhead lines for the buses as well.

Link to comment

Andy, Very nice pan!

 

Are you stitching with Photoshop or Flir Tools + ?

I tried a few pan stitches with Photoshop that didn't work, yet the same images worked with Flir Tools +.

 

Separate note, I suppose you have seen this $10 software offered on eBay?

Not sure what to think about it.

eBay item number: 301542483062

Link to comment

Stitching with photoshop. You need about 30% overlap to stitch. Also, PS seems to stitch better if you adjust the histograms beforehand rather than after. This is why it’s important to start from RAW. Otherwise the FLIR camera curves the image internally, and every image will be a bit different as the camera does its periodic recalibrations.

 

Have not seen that software before. Honestly, I wouldn’t buy it because I’d rather just write my own in matlab. I already have matlab batch-converting the jpegs to tiff by calling exiftool, and I will probably write my own stitching software at some point.

Link to comment

Hugin might be an interesting alternative for stitching:

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

It is possible to handle manual control points for difficult scenes.

 

This is a stereographic output projection from a difficult spherical panorama I made with Hugin some years ago:

post-150-0-09167400-1516445338.jpg

Had to shrink the image a bit to fit the forum from 18472 × 11771pixels

 

The location is inside a big EMC-measurement chamber, with a lot of emission-attenuating conical structures, that makes automatic stitching very difficult.

The measurement antenna-rig is at the end of the chamber by the blue area on the floor.

 

The FOV of this picture is very big possibly around 300° and not possible to achieve without stitching.

My tripod on the floor is at 180°.

Link to comment

I was wondering what commercial buildings might look like in FLIR. And streets. Love the manhole covers!

 

We could consider opening a FLIR section next to the IR board? Alternately, I could create a FLIR tag? And add mention of FLIR in the description under Infrared Photos.

Link to comment
Just tag by type of IR is my suggestion. FLIR is a company so let’s call it LWIR or “far infrared” though? And then I can tag my SWIR pics, NIR pics, and LWIR separately.
Link to comment
comes from the military aircraft pods for look ahead IR, FLIR = Forward Looking InfraRed then FLIR the company took the name.
Link to comment

Bob, they were selling to the government. You bet they charged! \cynical

 

well i guess you can thank the USG for paving the way for you to buy a second hand camera on ebay for $2k or so

Link to comment

The #1 biggest misconception I encounter with people who know nothing about UV/IR photography is that they associate the term "IR" or Infrared with Thermal imaging,

and the IR we do with out UV/IR or IR converted cameras doesn't look anything like 'thermal' IR. So almost always when I tell someone I do infrared or IR photography,

they have a completely different idea of that in their heads.

 

The entire range of infrared is 700nm - 1mm, which falls between visible light and microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The breakdown of infrared:

NIR = 700nm - 1,400nm (our converted cameras are sensitive to about 700nm - 1,200 of that range)

SWIF = 1,400nm - 3,000nm (member nickspiker use to have some good examples of this posted on here, but I can't locate those now)

MWIR = 3,000nm - 8,000nm AKA 'Thermal IR'

LWIR = 8,000nm - 15,000nm AKA 'Thermal IR' Used by the thermal imaging cameras such as FLIR brand.

FIR = 15,000nm - 1,000,000nm (1mm)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared

 

FLIR = forward looking infrared, and company name.

 

https://en.wikipedia...ooking_infrared

 

https://en.wikipedia...ki/FLIR_Systems

Link to comment

FLIR used to sell MWIR focal plane array cameras as well.. they demo'd them for me once 20 years ago..

 

of course when i started 37 years ago after grad school you had to chisel caves out of stone for the computers we used with 1MB core memory.

Link to comment

My criticism is not of the government, but of defense contractors who chisel the government because they know they'll pay up. Have you noticed how every little thing from FLIR is overpriced? Like, even the tripod adapter for the E60 costs $50! It's a piece of cheap plastic and a SCREW.

--

 

Bob, FLIR still sells MWIR cameras! One day, guys, one day...

http://www.flir.com/cores/display/?id=51956

http://www.flir.com/science/display/?id=44791

Link to comment

Yes, but specifically the type we are using and talking about here are the LWIR type.

You knew that, but just posted that so no one else would be confused.

Link to comment

Excellent! I was about to ask for a color version.

Is your E60 stock or an E30/E40/E50 with firmware mod upgrade to E60? I don't see any FLIR logo... or can you turn off the FLIR logo with the stock E60?

Link to comment

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...