How Do Infrared Cameras Work (Part I)
How Do Infrared Cameras Work (Part I)
The fundamental thing to know about thermal/infrared cameras is that the cameras don’t work like ordinary EO/visible light cameras. Normally speaking that regular daylight cameras and the human eye both work on the same basic principle: visible light radiation energy hits something, bounces off it, a detector receives the reflected light, and then turns it into an image.
(picture from internet)
Thermal imagers make pictures from radiation of different temperatures, not visible light. Heat (also called infrared or thermal energy) and light are both parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a camera that can detect visible light won’t see thermal energy, and vice versa. Thermal cameras capture infrared energy and use the data to create images through digital or analog video outputs.
