Extraordinary pictures despite extreme light conditions

Computer Vision very often is facing unsolved problems in applications where extreme light conditions occur. Scenes with high dynamic range are common in some industrial applications such as welding inspection, inspection of high reflective material (CD ROMs and other shiny material) or environmental applications like traffic control (at daylight, night, in tunnels with headlights on) and so on. In most of these demanding applications the CMOS camera from Kamera Werk Dresden will provide a solution.

Quality Control in welding applications is a very good example to show the benefit of the LOGLUX camera. The arc represents the only source of light.

The pictures were taken with the following exposure times:

• 4ms for dark areas
• 250 µs for medium areas
• 10 µs for the brightest picture portions

The example pictures of a 100 W light bulb shows results achieved with different exposure conditions. The use of a linear characteristics (common to most cameras) already shows brilliant sharp picture with no blooming effects.

Adding a second integration level (e.g. 3000 µs) results in a tremendous improvement of image quality within the low light areas without disturbing the bright shiny filiament. A third integration step can improve medium portions again better. The improvement is seen best in the area of the supporting wires.