New smart phone with thermal imaging
This looks like it could be great. Has anyone tried thermal imaging cameras to look for mammals, especially small mammals?
http://futurism.com/caterpillar-launches-rugged-smartphone-predator-vision/
Jon
4 Comments
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Nick
Interesting, i was actually looking at buying a high end thermal camera, but the reviews are extremely mixed. I think for Pampas areas or even rocky areas they could be useful but in brush they are apparently useless. I know hunters / Anti Poaching units in Africa are using high quality one’s to some sucess but i think i will wait untill the technology has improved.
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SLahaye
We used the InfraCam of the brand Flir recently. Within an hour we managed to locate about 5 wood mice that we would have missed without. We didn’t test it on larger mammals. It was a bit of a mess to find the right temperature range to use for scanning the surroundings, but afterwards it was relatively easy to work with. The camera only measures the temperature of the first surface it reaches, so any animals behind trees, leafs, … will go undetected. For small species, the range is also somewhat limited, maybe about 15-20m, although we also detected some humans that were walking about 100m away. It was a nice toy to play around with! We only tested it on foot, not sure how it would work from a car…
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Richard Webb
Jon, I trialed a FLIR lower end image thermal cameras and wasn’t that impressed due to the lack of real range and small image size but that was over 3 years ago and they may have moved on. Having said that this camera is less than 25% of the price of the camera I tried so I doubt that it is exactly state of the art technology.