Infrared Camera in 7 steps ( DIY )

hi fellows,
i’ve actually done this a couple of weeks ago but i had no time to blog about it.I’ll try to explain how it’s done and what to be careful about step by step.
1-Get your webcam

2- Remove the lens

3- Remove lens cover

4-Pull out glasses
Warning : Becareful about the order and the orientation of the glasses.

5-Put all glasses back inside except for that red tinted one which is the infrared filter.
Warning : Becareful to put glasses as in the order and the orientation they were in the step 4.

6-Reassemble the lens back into the webcam.

7-Your Infrared Cam. is ready to go Plug the usb and see the difference by testing it with a tv remote controller etc. .

Test :
Here you can see the unfiltered IR light.But it’s more than useless in the daylight as you can see.If you wanna see how it would look like in the dark check out the photos taken after Filtering Out Visible Colors mod.

Optional modification:

Filtering out the Visible Colors

Sometimes filtering out visible colors might be useful.For instance if you are working on Computer Vision; you can get a very clear image of a IR light source by filtering out the visible colors.
Materials:
Tape
Camera Film ( This is the key material here it filters out the visible colors and only allows IR light to pass through )

1-Crop a little piece from the film.
2-Place it in the middle of the tape.
3-Then tape it onto camera and make sure the film covers the aperture of the lens.

 

So why i did this? I was pretty impressed by Johnny Lee’s Implementations with Wiimote. Well i was hoping to develop such Augmented Reality Projects etc. with it.But it turned out that the 320*240px low. resolution camera is a little inefficient to do that.That’s why Lee uses Wiimote which has a 1024*768px resolution camera and specifically designed hardware to detect multiple blobs.But wait lets not disappoint you if you have such a low res. cam and already done the steps above.Low resolution camera happens to be a problem only in the Touch Surface Implementation but it’s ok with other projects like HeadTracking etc.

Why it is a problem in Touch Surface implementation?

In the photo below i tried to explain the loss of sensitivity in position data as the coordinates warped.