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Highly Infrared reflective paint, tape or fabric

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#1

Hey guys,

im working on a project using fiducial trackers. We are currently trying to avoid the markers to be backlit with LED’s. Ive modified a Logitech C920 into a infrared Camera.

Question:

Im looking for higly infrared reflective material’s so we can light the markers with infrared lighting.

  • Paint: ( only found heat isolating house paint )

  • Tape: ( maybe the same material as those tracking balls used in various systems)

  • Fabric / Paper
    Based on this thread and my own little tests there are certain fabrics that seem to reflect more than others.
    https://discourse.vvvv.org/t/315

Tape would be the best solution for the marker situation, but im also very very interested in paint for further experiments :)

Any advise would be very helpful, since I always end up with medical equipment or some mystical healing stuff via google :D

#2

Some informations I have found on the Reactivision forum:

Infrared absorbing dyes / Paint pigments

http://www.epolin.com/Default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Transparent Infrared absorbing Filters by 3M called Vikuiti

http://solutions.3m.co.uk/wps/portal/3M/en_GB/vikuiti-uk/home/

This would be a possibility to print or plot/cut the markers with this transparent layer over a highly infrared reflective surface/paint.

Have not found anything specific about reflective paint, just absorbing materials.

#3

@white paint pigment: titanium dioxide

#4

Using retroreflective paint and a ring of IR LED’s around your cam could save you from buying large IR sources to flood the whole room.

#5

Almost all paints of all colors and even dyed fabrics reflect IR, the challenge is to find those that don’t for contrast.

But as Meierhans suggested you can use “safety” reflective tapes and fabrics (a web search will turn up lots) that have very high gain for light near the viewer. You can use a ringlight, but I’ve found any IR source next to the camera works well unless the camera is very close to the object (the lens-to-light distance is a large fraction of the lens-to-object distance). The 3M brand name is “Scotchlite”, but there are many around. Here in the US every car parts store has reflective tapes, and the fabrics can be ordered online.

Tip: you can make almost invisible fiducials by using normal black paint (which is usually very IR reflective) and an IR absorbing black paint.

Tip #2: Plug your IR cam into your laptop and go to the paint/fabric store.

Here’s a pic with an IR-modified PS3Eye where the dancers have the safety reflective fabric woven into their costumes, with a standard 100W tungsten clamp light (with RGB gels to block the visible light) next to the camera. Even with the stage being lit with tungsten stage lighting the fabric is such high gain it still reads easily:

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