Robert Turner, "Thermal technology - the past, the present and the future"

uh in my case a manufacturer of thermal imaging cameras which is what I'll be going through today and we are called upon by the ASC members to help them specialize with their projects help them out advise them in the right capacity so the talk today as it says up here is going to be the advantages of multi-sensor platforms across thermal technology thermal technology has been around for a long time but as the gentleman said earlier thermal technology has really changed especially in just the last six months and I'll go through why so what do I mean by multi-sensor platform with thermal cameras or thermal imaging cameras nowadays what we are looking at is rather than just having the thermal camera on its own it's going to be combined with as it says there multi-sensors so different types of equipment going with it but going on the same platform so we just go through these three examples to give you a basic idea the system on the far left here there's a radar sat on the top there's a pan tilt unit or PTZ unit depending where you are in the world in the middle there's a thermal camera or a thermal tube as we call it on the left hand side and there's a visible camera on the right hand side normally that is probably quite a generic system for the thermal industry and obviously having the radar on top greatly enhances it but the system below is normally what you'd class as a standard system so you have your thermal camera you have your visible camera the unit then in the middle is something slightly different again so same middle unit same PTU same PTZ but this time there's an acoustic loud hailer on the left hand side so that will be able to generate audio messages uh get off my land you're going to be shot Etc and this can go up to two kilometers on this particular one so there are out ones out there on the market can go even further but these are HD quality on the audio as well so the audio is very very good very very clear also on here is a visible camera which is the top item and then below that is an Illuminator so now we've got a white light a laser dazzler an Illuminator again different products different sensors being added to the same middle controlling piece then you go to the more standard the more recognized uh unit which is the one on the far right here and move out the way which is a combined unit again so there's a visible camera there's a little Sony starvis visible camera in there but then there's also a fixed lens thermal camera within the same housing this camera is a lot smaller a lot more compact for those that are in normal CCTV world that is more like a normal box standard PTZ but you've got the advantage of having the invisible and your thermal in one unit so complementary Technologies how are things changing and how are things moving on the particular unit here is just a slightly bigger version of the one you saw on the right there hopefully you can just about see these videos but what we're trying to say here is that we've got nowadays in the thermal Market a thermal camera with a visible camera so the thermal is giving you good night time and high contrast detection and the visible is obviously there during the day and situation or awareness having these two cameras together hopefully gives you the best of both worlds and as you'll see from the videos moving across this particular camera has a zoom lens on the thermal as well so again it's still a small compact camera and this particular camera is actually shown on the stand over in exhibitors Hall so you can have zoomable thermal lenses on this and then obviously you've got your daytime camera as well which is also zoomable sort of applications where these are being used nowadays A lot's been used for maritime since the start of thermal cameras for obvious reasons critical infrastructure sites as well and perimeter security however again this is changing the markets are coming a lot lot further down to more commercial premises and these types of cameras are being used in more and more places these are the smaller units we're going to get onto the bigger units but again just to give you an example so touching on the rest of the smaller units again you don't need to have a thermal camera in there at all uh another device or another unit is back to the visible camera in a PTZ but this time white light infrared or a hybrid mix in the two again all possible Within These units great application for law enforcement and perimeter security a lot of these Styler cameras are installed on vehicles on boats so again a totally different application a totally different Market the video I appreciate there's a lot of light on this so the video you can't see that clearly but that's just showing the Illuminator uh which is part of the light on this system at 120 meters so it's not a massive Illuminator but again it's just showing you the example of what it can do more complementary Technologies and moving on to bigger systems now so this particular system is where you would get them much much further mid to long range thermal lenses and thermal cameras so again this is a multi-center platform again but now we've gone up to three units on the same so we're still on the same PTU unit we're still on the same PTZ platform on the left-hand side a thermal lens again on the top right a visible camera a small visible camera but below it a much much bigger powerful long distance thermal lens we also have something which we call this this basically three or four different types of thermal camera there's one called swer which is shortwave infrared there's one which is medium wave infrared and there's one which is long wave infrared the reason we have the three different types is they can achieve different things as you'll see from this video in a minute one of these items on this multi-sensor platform is also a swirl thermal camera so what do we mean by that it's a short wave infrared what it does is the thing that thermal cameras mostly hate is fog and Mist if it's very dense fog very dense Mist a thermal camera can't see through it a short wave infrared thermal camera can and what you're going to see in the video in a minute an example it's quite a short video so apologies for that might go back and show that one again this video is a normal thermal camera and then the next image you see is the swirl camera in exactly the same location so hopefully this will go back so I appreciate that's a quick video so that is a normal thermal camera in the same location and then we've switched the imagery to the swirl so it's the same scene same time of day same amount of fog and Mist but as you can clearly see from the swirl it's completely cut that out so again different environment different example used for different products but all coming back to this multi-sensor platform so what are we trying to say and what we're trying to get across today about thermal cameras is and I think I said it to a gentleman today that was already talking to if you went back two or three years time it would almost be this is the thermal camera will this fit your application now it's what is your application and we will fit all thermal camera to that so most of these systems are almost ending up being bespoke they've physically being made and tailored for you because it's a very very modular system again you can change as I say pretty much most of the bits left to right and obviously you can still add stuff on the top as well doesn't even have to be a radar other items can be added to the top of the system but again you're combining it all as one unit touched on acoustic hailers a bit earlier on and showed a photo this one is a one kilometer acoustic hailer so again it's half the size half the distance again on the left hand side then you've also got a visible camera on there with an Illuminator so again just mix and matching the actual platforms that we can offer ah there we go that's better so that's showing you a better example of the 120 mil 120 meter sorry Illuminator again this is a very very small Illuminator we do have illuminators that can do up to 10 kilometers so there's some very very powerful ones out there obviously with illuminators and Laser dazzers and things like that you have to be careful where they're sold around the world uh laser dazzlers for example are banned in the UK because if they look at you for long enough they can blind you so yes it's a massive deterrent but obviously there are risks involved as well another massive Market at the moment and obviously with everything that's going on in the world a huge growing Market amount of drones and drone detection now thermal cameras again are being used more and more for the Drone Market again getting back and I keep saying it but we're going to keep coming back to it the multi-sensor platform so with this unit now on the left hand side we've got somebody else's radar a completely different radar to the ones we've shown before we've still got our thermal camera on the left hand side we've still got our visible on the right hand side but now we've got RF Jammers underneath so now we're jamming the frequency of the Drone that's one thing that we can do with the Drone and as we go through it what we show is that also with the Drone we can do return to base so we can jam the Drone and send a signal to the Drone to say go back to where you came from go back to who's controlling it what we can then do with that is we can then send our own drone up via our thermal camera system and the whole system to then follow that drone so you've probably heard about the incidents that's happened in the UK with Gatwick uh where a drone stopped Gatwick for almost a day and a half uh no flights in or out what we could have done in that situation is we would have sent a signal to that drone sent it back to him or her who's flying it from their vehicle or wherever and our drone would follow it and show images of those people and catch them in the act for other areas of Europe and the world we can also do his hard kill again we're not allowed to do that in the UK but in some countries you can do hard kill and that quite simply means it just kills it dead so it will fall directly out of the sky for obvious reasons that's not always liked in most countries especially if they're carrying payloads that could be quite dangerous but it is an option other options again it says there you've got actions and mitigation so you can do lots of different things the point that we're trying to make here is that as you can see from the image in the top and the middle there sorry that's captured on a 960 mil thermal so it's a very very big lens it's HD quality but it's capturing a drone at two kilometers there are some systems at the moment that can do three three and a half kilometers we would always recommend that it's backed up with a radar but again this can all be done on the right hand side it's just showing you a physical image of the unit that's obviously tracking that drone future capabilities now this is where and it was said into the introduction where thermal cameras in the thermal Market has changed so so much even in the last six months everybody knows that megapixel cameras high definition cameras for Visible have been around a long long time in the thermal Market they haven't in the thermal Market they were blobs a couple of years ago it was hard to tell a person from a person an animal from an animal a vehicle from a vehicle the quality of the thermal cameras has changed rapidly and one of the biggest issues with thermal cameras at the moment and it's a real sort of bug bear for people who are buying the cameras who are installing the cameras and maintaining the cameras is what we call a cooled camera or an uncalled camera now in simple layman's terms if a thermal camera has a cooler that means it has a part in there which is almost sort of on a clock as it's ticking down most coolers have a 10 000 hour lifespan some have twenty thousand hours some even go up to fifty thousand hours but what happens is once those hours run out the cooler will stop working and your image will go so this is a partner that needs replacing and this is a part that needs changing that doesn't sound much of an issue until you think that this could be on a 50 meter Tower 30 meter Tower in the middle of nowhere these are return to base items for all thermal camera manufacturers it takes anything from four to six weeks to do the cooler service to replace it and send it back so that's not ideal and it's also quite expensive cost effective as most salespeople would say but it is expensive so there's been a big push in the industry for thermal cameras to move across to uncalled cameras now uncalled cameras as it says has no cooler so there's no service in there's no return to base and they are pretty much maintenance free the only issue of an uncalled cameras currently they cannot see as far as a cooled camera which is why we use cool cameras because we can get bigger lenses now this is the part of the market that's changed rapidly because not only with the lenses a lot bigger on called and the uncles are quite small lenses also the quality of the uncooled cameras was nowhere near the quality of the cooled cameras and what I mean by that is you can see on the screen that the one that it's showing there is saying it's 1280 by 1024 definition for the thermal camera which is HD if you're into your visible cameras that's a sort of resolution you're expecting that wasn't what you were getting on thermal uh an uncle or even called for quite some time now it's a given on called cameras and you can get that quality but this image in this video you're going to see is from an uncalled camera also the lens is on the uncalled cameras used to go up to about 75 105 mil Max so this video that I'm going to show is actually from a 225 mil sorry from a 150 mil but we can now go up to a two to five mil on the uncooked and we're currently in the processes of testing of 300. so again the lenses now are getting bigger or uncalled but you've got rid of all of that maintenance cost all of that burden but you've also now got HD quality again it sounds a bit weird if you're talking to people who are into visible camera security because they're expecting HD quality on everything but to have a firmware with HD quality is a big thing moving forward so this video I'll let it run through because it's I think it's a couple of minutes um this is just showing you the uncalled camera so it's a 150mm lens that building that's in the background there in the middle is about two and a half three kilometers away so again just giving you an indication of the sort of distances that the smaller uncalled can do but what you'll notice now is it looks more like a mono image it does not look like a thermal image yes we can turn it into the funky colors that you have if you've seen the Predator films and all the rest of it but for us we use either black hot or white hot so this is shown this image but you can see now the detail The Cars Moving around you can see people walking put that one back you can see people walking around say Cars Moving you can even see the oil tankers in the background as well so it's a very very detailed detailed image and a very very crisp image so again technology on thermals rapidly changing so the lens is getting bigger you're going to receive at further distances but the physical cost of the lens and the upkeep and the service into the lens has obviously changed which makes a big difference to our Market that's at to say about two and a half three kilometers just wait for this one to finish so this one is from a cooled camera which is a much much bigger lens and what you'll notice is straight away you think that the image is nowhere near as good quality as the one you've just seen that's because it is still HD but this is at 67 kilometers so now you can see there's a massive difference with the cooled camera so that's almost 35 miles for those at dually miles or kilometers this one a little bit closer so 12 kilometers which is a short distance for us but again this is a cooled camera and you can just about see the heat hose hopefully you can see that from the back there of the airport but what you're seeing is it's the detail that you're now being able to pick out again it does not look like a thermal camera it looks more like a mono camera which is what we're leaning towards so it's sort of two-fold really you can't get the distances of very long distances that you want with uncalled but you can get the quality we've cooled you can definitely have the quality and you can definitely get the distances but that gap between how far up the uncles can go and how far the chords can go is obviously changing and that's a big change for the market because as I say to give you an idea a ten thousand hour cooler to replace it change it send it back even the standard one's about thirty thousand pounds to do that and if it's ten thousand hours that's every year nice most customers are not going to want to do that um we wish they would from a sales point of view but it's not something they want to do and for us it's something that the Market's turning away from where we can obviously on all of them you can't if it has to be called it has to be called there's nothing wrong with cool cameras but it's just so you are fully aware of the reasons why moving on for future capabilities and again something that's been asked a lot today is analytics so again analytics always sits away from thermal cameras currently um they're never normally embedded within the head like they are on a normal camera they're never normally with the system it's normally by third party the future is changing on that So currently they are still third party but moving forward they're going to be built in and just make life a lot easier for the end users and customers like yourself so this particular video that we're going to show is what we call Advanced tracking and auto classification so this is on a visible camera and what the video will show again it's a very very short video so apologies for that I'll probably play it twice um but what this one is doing is we have asked this one to track a jet ski because we're in a harbor and we're looking for the lovely jet ski Riders who love them or hate them uh cause a few issues at the moment so what this video would do is highlight that the fact that is a jet ski I appreciate you can't read the text but it does actually say jet ski above the jet ski it will also highlight the pleasure boat and we'll say pleasure boat above that and it's also highlighting the tanker in the background and it's classifying that as well and you'll see other boats in the video as well so again we've asked it to track the jet ski and that's what it's doing but it's still Auto classification and identifying the other units within the field of view as well so quite a short video that one let's just play that one again he said there you go so again it's just another area for the thermal industry another area for the multi-sensor platform so again the days of where it was just a thermal camera and that's all it's done have gone it's moved on greatly the next video you saw a little still frame of it earlier so this is our 960 mil lens which is currently our second biggest thermal lens we now do a thousand mil HD lens but this is tracking as it says there a helicopter at 10 kilometers now that's far our own software and something that we have built in which again we are growing and changing but again it's showing you the capabilities of what's possible with thermal cameras you wouldn't even see that on a Daily Camera so again the firm always noticed that and the firm always picked up still on future capabilities um and getting near the end but just to show where it's going for the future so there's something coming from the market which is called nexos and basically it's getting back to what I was saying about the actual software being built into the cameras and the platforms itself most thermal cameras on the market obviously have an internal middle internal PTU pan to zoom unit and it's actually quite dumb so what we mean by that is it will take the images in it will move the camera around left right up down but then it would just send those images to a VMS to a C2 platform or to a third-party software in the very near future there's quite a few companies on the market who are looking to do smart intelligent ptus so now analytics video processing Edge capabilities VMS etc etc could be placed within the physical PTU unit itself there's also a massive move towards adding lots and lots of different software motion detection Line crossing all this sort of stuff that's normally associated with visible cameras but hasn't been associated with thermal but now there's a move to put that within the thermal camera industry so these will go from being a dumb PTU to being a smart intelligent PTU hopefully if things go the way they should go it's almost going to get to the point where these particular units will be almost like an Apple iPhone so it will have a particular version of software on there a particular version of firmware on there as things are added in the future as things change they're about to literally do an upgrade so just like your iOS whatever we're on now 16 whatever level we're on now you'll be able to do that with the thermal camera Market moving forward so again exciting times for thermal it's changed a lot um appreciate it's probably not half an hour speech so apologies for that but just wanted to get across the basics of the fact that yeah thermal cameras are really really changing the quality is improving day by day week by week whereas they were usually just used for medium to long term projects or long medium to long term medium to long positions and distance projects they're now being used for a lot lot smaller commercial sites more perimeters process implants etc etc we're even doing houses and Estates and you name it we're doing it so again it's a massive range that we can do now from very very small to very very big our smallest camera would do half a kilometer of detection our biggest camera currently we do 70 kilometers so again there's probably 400 different variants within that so it's a massive massive Market as said earlier as well uh so thank you very much if you do have any questions more than happy to take them here or if you want to come over to the booth entirely up to you but thank you very much thank you uh there is some elephant in the room questions all right okay yeah one is is there any surveillance for the surveillance knowing how uh very expensive this equipment is because like we're hearing now legends that in Sweden there's 10 speed cameras gone and being used on drones somewhere in the war in Ukraine so surveillance on surveillance for these very very very expensive equipment you have some of them are very expensive I mean the top end is obviously expensive because of what it's doing but the the baby ones are very very reasonably priced so they they start off very low and go very very big so it's entirely up to you however to answer one of your questions we do actually have quite a few sites where our bigger systems are actually monitored by our smaller cameras so again they are literally looking at the bigger systems to make sure no one's interfering with them they're protected they looked after etc etc so yeah I mean they can go up in value quite drastically or they can start very very low and are these cameras and systems are also built to use privately yes uh weirdly it started off with millionaires for obvious reasons because of the price but any regulations on that because like 2 10 60 kilometers you have different regulations depending on what country you're in um we've done one recently in the UK for a millionaire who has actually drones in his grounds so if you were to try and break into his house jump over his fence drones will be alerted by the cameras and come to your area and then warnings will be issued and all the rest of it so this is a very very large commercial private residential property and there are rules definitely most of the cameras have to be focusing within the property rather than looking out or if they do look out they can't look at public roads they can't look in people's windows so you've got black but that applies to normal CCTV as well and the same rules apply with thermal it's just obviously thermal can see a lot lot further no I mean the range is just amazing and then are you saying that the Drone problem at the airports are solved now if they take it up and buy it yes um but yeah it can be solved now and they are solving and they're working their way through it but drones are a real issue they have been in the UK I say Gatwick it stopped it for a day day and a half so but they are working with different companies and different manufacturers to sort that there is a way of doing it over here in other countries like this it's a lot easier because we can do more we can do laser dazzlers we can we can kill the Drone we can return it to base in the UK is a lot more restrictions um in France there's a lot more again it's different for each country and uh one very unbelight question any uh orders or purchases from war zones uh yes we have to be really careful with war zones because again if it's classed as a war zone we can't export thermal cameras to them you can't make sure that it doesn't end there yes I mean we have done we've done sites where it's then become a war zone and certain countries obviously not too far away way but we can't do ones in physical conflict yeah currently but you can't make sure that they end up in the war zone even not bought from yeah there are real strict restrictions so if I was to sell it to you and then you were to sell it on to another country then there are real strict laws about that because obviously that's not something you should be doing uh because it's all export controlled all right thank you rob thank you thank you and a little present and a little diploma from us thank you oh

2023-01-24 20:00

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