Adrian Fazekas at ISAC, Aachen had been working with camera detection for a long time. He used to identify fire or smoke in tunnels when he realised that the cameras also could detect traffic. With this in mind, he developed a system that could monitor the position of a moving vehicle from a film.

The only issue was that it worked in daylight, and not when it was dark. In dark surroundings, headlights from the car blur the images out and make it virtually impossible to see anything. Was there some way to capture an image without getting the light glare? There was.

Light has no temperature, but other things have. It would be possible to measure the temperatures of everything around with a thermal camera and translate this into a picture. This would mean no glare effects from lights, as well as the ability to see in total darkness without revealing any explicit details. As long as there is a temperature difference between the objects, that is.

This has proved to work well, according to Adrian’s fellow scientist Moritz Berghaus. All cars in the early tests have been possible to spot, as there is likely always a temperature difference between car and road. In winter, the car is much warmer than the road and in summer the road is potentially much hotter.

There is of course a risk that somewhere in-between comes is a time when both cars and road share the same temperature. This is nothing yet encountered, and in case the car and road blur together it would be possible to calibrate the camera to more clearly emphasise minute temperature differences.

That said, there may still be problems with this type of camera. Heavy rain or fog could potentially make it difficult for to reach out and measure the correct things. However, even an ordinary camera will have problems coping with these situations. The future will tell if thermal cameras will be used everywhere, but it certainly looks warm to the MeBeSafe project.