Infrared Zoom Moves Toward the Mainstream
Tuesday, December 01 2009
For many years, infrared vision was limited to government and laboratory applications, but the picture is rapidly changing. With the cost of thermal cameras decreasing, military, aerospace, and scientific applications have expanded and the world of infrared has exploded with innovative new uses for law enforcement, surveillance, commercial, and even consumer applications.
Expanding Uses for IR
The military remains the largest buyer
of infrared technology, but the tools we
now provide to our forces are more powerful,
and we can put them into the
hands of more troops — highly precise
IR to gather intelligence and assess situations
from miles away. Soldiers can see
people and weapons cloaked by darkness,
smoke, fog, or camouflage. Zoom
allows them flexibility and enables them
to maintain target acquisition from far
to near distance.
The same benefits apply to innovative
uses off the battlefield, and provide
many opportunities to improve productivity,
decrease waste, and save lives. For
example:
- Firefighters use IR to search out people in smoke-filled rooms, speeding rescue time and decreasing danger to themselves.
- Rescue helicopters can rapidly scan large areas for people lost at sea or on land, then zoom in to make an analysis of need. Long-wave infrared can see clearly through fog and smoke, enabling rescue in conditions that, in the past, made finding a person unlikely.
- High-resolution border and commercial surveillance, ranging many miles.
- Police can follow suspects from ground or air at night.
- Machine vision in bottling and other plants.
- In medicine, IR can determine if needles are properly inserted.
- Use in home inspections, where IR can determine if insulation needs to be replaced, water damage has occurred, or if mold or rot is present in the walls.
- Spectral filters can tell the presence or absence of chemicals or gases, and whether or not they are harmful.
IR in the Consumer Market
Infrared is also penetrating the consumer
market, with IR in automobiles,
cameras, and home surveillance. At
present, the quality of most consumer
infrared is low, and its capabilities limited.
While cameras have come down in
price due to manufacturing efficiencies,
precision IR lenses are highly dependent
on raw materials (e.g. Germanium)
that are not manufactured, but rather
are dug out of the ground. Our greatest
challenge is the high cost of these base
materials, which makes the IR lens a significant
fraction of overall system cost.
We and other lens manufacturers are
attempting to reduce the amount of
required material and thus reduce cost.
At the moment, however, precision and
price are closely linked; high-quality
infrared lenses remain expensive as
compared to their visible cousins.
We are just at the beginning of commercial,
off-the-shelf infrared zoom lenses.
Several years ago, our company created
a Web site to offer stock IR zoom lenses
and provide clear information about
the pros and cons of the different
infrared wavelengths. We hope this tool
helps foster additional innovation that
moves the industry forward.
We are excited about the future, and encourage further discussion and innovation as the demand for high-quality mainstream infrared increases.
More Information
For more information, contact Jon Kane at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit http://info.hotims.com/22932-122.