Can a TV camera be blinded by IR?

Sounds like this neighbourhood war has been going on for quite awhile, and this is just the latest episode. Sometimes the only solution is to move, and be nicer to the next set of neighbours.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

If that's the case, then I suspect that a bunch of high-output narrow- dispersion IR LEDs, aimed in the direction of the camera, and driven with periodic high-current pulses, might be the way to go. Think "IR flash". You can get significantly higher peak intensity from LEDs by pulsing them - their peak-current capacity is higher than their continuous-current capacity.

Camera sensors tend to have some "memory", and so if "blinded" by a bright flash they'll take a fraction of a second (or more) to recover, just as human eyes do.

Strobing a bank of IR LEDs several times a second might "give 'em fits".

If you really want to get cute, build a sizable panel of IR LEDs in a rectangular layout with individual drivers (e.g. one transistor per LED, or row-and-column drivers), hook it up to a PC or single-board computer through a suitable interface, and write some software which "strobes" a message across it.

"STOP SPYING ON US!"

It'd be invisible to the eye, but visible to the camera.

Maybe it's just a paranoid interpretation of it all.

I had to read the original post a few times to follow who was doing what.

In the end, are we sure the guy with the camera is spying on the backyard, or is he outright spying on the bathroom?

Michael

Because it's all we have and we need something to talk about on a Friday evening.

Does something unusual ever happen there?

This isn't really a sentence, yet I think it's the crucial point you're making here. The camera seems to be taking pictures of BOTH the backyad and her window???

Even if there were no camera, is she going to check constantly to see if someone is looking out the neighbor's window? Let her pull down the shade when she wants privacy. If she doesn't want privacy when she should want it, that's for her parents to correct.

Out of his home or in the back yard?

Does it involve the girl? Or her room?

Is the neighbor breaking some law? What law?

Maybe it's a civil matter and your friend should sue, but I'm not sure what the cause of action would be. What do you two think?

Invasion of privacy? I don't think so. I'm not a lawyer but I think it's the girl's responsibility to pull down a shade, if she is even the target. They sell curtains and roll-down shades many places.

200 feet is pretty far. A fixed lens that can watch both the back yard and the girl's window is probably not going to show much detail of the girl. A telephoto lens might, but it's not likely it would show the back yard also.

Please explain the problem.

Per snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

I run my cams at 1280x720 with 6mm lenses. During the day, there

*might* be enough detail in the frame to embarrass somebody if they were out in the open and within 50 feet of the cam.

Indoors, behind a window, I would opine that the chances of - for instance - facial-recognition-level detail are vanishingly small.

At night, just forget the whole thing.... totally unrealistic unless there is a 9,000-lumen floodlight illuminating the subject and the subject is less than 25 feet away.

OTOH, as you kick up the lens' mm, detail gets better. OTOOH, the field of view shrinks...

--
Pete Cresswell

On Thursday, April 16, 2015 at 11:21:58 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wr ote:

bedroom window to spy on the friend's yard. The problem is in clear view o f the camera is the friend's 14 year old daughter's bedroom window. The nei ghbor claims that the friend is running an illegal business out of his home and the camera is there to try to catch him at it. My friend hasn't tried to get the state police involved yet but the local town cops won't do anyth ing about it.

to a monitor which I use to check IR remote transmitters. When I hold a sus pect remote a few feet from the camera and operate it the camera is essenti ally "blinded" by the otherwise invisible infrared pulse train. Can somethi ng like this be done cost effectively but naturally on a much larger scale to blind Bozo's camera? My friend got pissed off one night and sat there wi th a laser pointer directed at this camera for a couple of hours. Although it didn't resolve the problem, it did bring the cops down to advise my frie nd that he couldn't do that without violating the neighbors privacy! Makes you question the definition of "freedom". The distance looks to be about 2

00 feet. Thanks, Lenny.

Use the bright IR LED lighting BUT do it from inside the house.

What you do inside is expected to be private. That includes being able to parade around inside your own house in the nude with the shades up. Your neighbors cannot complain about it as it would violate your reasonable expectation of privacy within your own home. When you go outside it becomes a different issue.

With that said, a large bright LED array inside the window should not cause you an actionable problem by the law. The onus should then fall on the neighbor with the camera to prove you are intentionally interfering with his activity. Simply state in technical terms it is an 'experiment' being conducted to see what kind of wildlife/extraterrestrial beings it attracts (or something like that).

I'm afraid you've misused that phrase. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a standard used to decide if the goverment has violated the rights (under the Fourth Amendment to the Constition or a similar clause in a law or state constitution) of someone asserting the right to privacy. The opposite of how you are using the term.

It has nothing to do with whether one is permitted to display himself naked so that others can see. I don't know the details of that issue, but try having sex in front of a picture window with no shades that is near to and faces the street with pedestrians walking by and you'll find out that you don't have the unlimited right you think you do.

As to whether you have a 4th Amendment or other right then, when you don't have curtains or leave the curtains open, you waive your right of privacy.

BAD ADVICE! NOT TRUE!

Review court case of man arrested for vacuuming 'inside' his home while in the nude with shades open.

See

Perhaps it depends more on local interpretation. Please provide your source.

From the two-car garage that is in back of the house where he lives.