Is LED Lighting Improving Surveillance?

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Ethan Ace
Mar 13, 2018

Walking tonight by my house, it struck me that the parks department has started replacing low pressure sodium lights in the lamps with LEDs. You can see the one LED fixture here, compared to the very orange LPS lights elsewhere.

In the other direction, it's all low pressure sodium and incredibly orange. 

Are you seeing similar changes in your area(s)? Many of the street lights near me have changed to LED, as well. Is this having a positive effect on surveillance video?

In our tests, LPS lights had significant ill effects on video, turning everything orange/yellow. LED lighting didn't have these issues, aside from overexposure issues due to brighter, and less diffuse, light.

 

(1)
U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 13, 2018
IPVMU Certified

I’ve noticed that when incadescent lights are replaced with LEDs of the same color space and apparent brightness, the scene is darker with the LEDs, when the camera is in night mode.

I think that is because incadescents inefficiently put out alot of IR that you don’t see with your eyes, but the camera can use when the IR cut is off.

Sodium lights are super effecient like LEDs, so that probably doesn’t hold true for them.

Still it might be interesting to see those scenes without a cut filter and in B&W...

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Ethan Ace
Mar 13, 2018

Sodium lights have a very narrow spectrum in the yellow/orange range. High pressure is better than low, but this is the spectrum of LPS:

Versus a soft white incandescent:

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U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 14, 2018
IPVMU Certified

Nice Doberman :)

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Ethan Ace
Mar 14, 2018

Wow you really inspected that picture hard. But he's actually a Treeing Feist.

U
Undisclosed #1
Mar 14, 2018
IPVMU Certified

Your ‘Spot’ monitor, eh?

I was trying to figure out if the line of white light in the picture was coming from the one LED fixture, since it doesn’t look to be directional:

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Mar 14, 2018

Coincidentally my street was just changed to LED as well, and the block seems darker to the naked eye. I believe for one it has to do with the wavelengths the human eye sees more vividly, as I've always found shadows with cooler light to be harsher and less detail discernible.

But more significantly the old sodium streetlights generally had a large convex dome that served to scatter a lot of light radially, whereas LEDs are much more directional and fire mostly straight downward. Scenes appear darker simply because the lamps no longer project any side scatter. This is positive for light pollution, but negative when wanting to get a better picture of an area. I've driven down long streets in town that have all been converted to LED and it almost looks like there's a blackout in the area.

For surveillance however it is far better, since as Ethan points out above, color reproduction is far more accurate. In fact the first indication to me that our street had been changed was when I checked my cameras and noticed a considerably improved picture in terms of color and evenness. It was a remarkable difference (see below).

The brightness in certain situations is also a huge benefit. At work, one of the back lane streetlights was recently changed to LED and the camera facing it now never switches to night mode because it's so bright.

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Ethan Ace
Mar 14, 2018

Wow, that is a huge difference, and exactly what I was wondering. It's also impressive how difficult it is to make out colors on the cars across the street under the sodium lamp vs. the bright red of that truck under the LED.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Mar 14, 2018

Yep, and here's a slightly better comparison that has the garbage bins out front under the sodium light. You can't even tell one is supposed to be blue.

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Michael Budalich
Mar 14, 2018
Genetec

It definitely is. I noticed this at my parking garage. In the below screencap from Sony's EM642R you can tell the LED lighting in the background makes every single parking spot # in the foreground clearly visible. However, the other side has a HPS light and it is not as clear an image. Granted it's going to be harder to see farther away but I think it's pretty obvious the area lit up by LED looks much better.

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