Another huge missed opportunity is thermal vision. Thermal infrared vision is a gigantic boon for hunting at night, and you might expect eg owls and hawks to use it to spot prey hundreds of meters away in pitch darkness, but no animals do (some have thermal sensing, but only extremely short range)
Snakes have thermal vision, using pits on their cheeks to form pinhole cameras. It pays to be cold-blooded when you’re looking for nice hot mice to eat.
If you are warm, any warm-detectors inside your body will detect mostly you. Imagine if blood vessels in your own eye radiated in visible spectrum with the same intensity as daylight environment.
It‘s possible to filter out a constant high value, but not possible to filter out a high level of noise. Unfortunately warmth = random vibration = noise. If you want a low noise thermal camera, you have to cool the detector, or only look for hot things, like engine flares. Fighter planes do both.
Another huge missed opportunity is thermal vision. Thermal infrared vision is a gigantic boon for hunting at night, and you might expect eg owls and hawks to use it to spot prey hundreds of meters away in pitch darkness, but no animals do (some have thermal sensing, but only extremely short range)
Snakes have thermal vision, using pits on their cheeks to form pinhole cameras. It pays to be cold-blooded when you’re looking for nice hot mice to eat.
Thermal vision for warm-blooded animals has obvious problems with noise.
Care to explain? Noise?
If you are warm, any warm-detectors inside your body will detect mostly you. Imagine if blood vessels in your own eye radiated in visible spectrum with the same intensity as daylight environment.
Can’t you filter that out? .
How do fighter planes do it?
It‘s possible to filter out a constant high value, but not possible to filter out a high level of noise. Unfortunately warmth = random vibration = noise. If you want a low noise thermal camera, you have to cool the detector, or only look for hot things, like engine flares. Fighter planes do both.
Woah great example didn’t know bout that. Thanks Tao