Improvement of the flare evaluation for cameras and imaging applications when using near-infrared lighting

Abstract

Near-infrared (NIR) light sources have become increasingly present in our daily lives, which led to the growth of the number of cameras designed for viewing in the NIR spectrum (sometimes in addition to the visible) in the automotive, mobile, and surveillance sectors. However, camera evaluation metrics are still mainly focused on sensors in visible lights. The goal of this article is to extend our existing flare setup and objective flare metric to quantify NIR flare for different cameras and to evaluate the performance of several NIR filters. We also compare the results in both visible and NIR lighting for different types of devices. Moreover, we propose a new method to measure the ISO speed rating in visible light spectrum (originally defined in the ISO standard 12232) and an equivalent ISO for NIR spectrum with our flare setup.