Can a high power (1W) laser permanently damage a traffic camera sensor?

First, they are usually full up NTSC cameras, doing some image processing to detect vehicle presence and activity. Remember Jim, I was in this business for a little while... ;-)

As for loops, 3M designed some neat little magnetometer things that you just drilled a 2" hole in the asphalt and cut a slot to the edge of the road and hooked them up. They went down about 3" below the roadway, so you could repave over them without damage. They then went into a digital lane card, and looked like the cat's meow for this application.

The companies that sold loop equipment fixed that, though. They had the 'official' standards ban anything other than inductive loops and analog lane cards. They did this at both the state and federal levels!

Charlie

yes agreed, the cameras for red light tickets are not the same as the cameras for controlling the left turn arrows.

the red light cameras are usually mounted on large seperate poles with strobe light fash when triggered.

the controller cameras are smaller and usually mounted right on the same structure as the traffic lights.

these controller cameras are our friends, they really do help traffic flow.

Mark

I've had a grad student destroy a vidicon tube with 5 mW of 632.8 nm light focused by a good lens.

If you had a good quality one watt static beam, with good Gaussian qualities, you could easily damage a silicon CCD.

On the other hand, with a Wicked Lasers Artic as mentioned earlier, your odds are 50/50.

Killing the CCD is different from damaging it. If you destroy the right spot, you get saturated vertical rows on the CCD. Otherwise you get a few black spots.

Steve