Anti facial recognitionglassesAmazon

A red laser diode from a DVD burner (~250mW, which is a lot!) will pretty much destroy any camera you aim it at, because of the lens, which conveniently focuses the laser beam into a tiny spot on the CCD. Anyone using a DSLR will also be permanently blind when you use this, and because of the reflection of the lens, the person aiming the laser is at serious risk of permanent eye damage, too.

In other words: you’ll need a really high-power, wide-angle IR LEDs, which eat batteries for breakfast and get seriously hot.

@Laser dude: ofcourse, the laser diode has a lens that produces a highly convergent beam (which ofcourse becomes divergent after a few mm), so you do need a lens or set of lenses to produce a parallel or very slightly convergent beam.

It all boils down to how much money you are prepared to pay for your camera it’s lens and any IR filters you might wish to include (and even the most expensive of cameras can be defeated if you know what you are doing).

More high tech would be putting appropriate filters on your camera lense to either stop the detector or even using a high tech specialised filter that stops the narow band component frequencies of the white light laser whilst allowing the broad band frequencies of the film or whatever the target is to pass.

I have been thinking about doing something similar, but pulse modulating the LED’s to both increase peak power and perhaps confusing the sync in the camera or display sweeps. Local “red light” cameras are a big source of revenue for towns with a 2 or 3 second yellow light and then a ticket in the mail.

I personally like the idea of an optical slave linked to a flash to overexpose the image of someone taking a photo, but as mentioned, this hinges on the photographer using a flash in the first place.

Ditto to what Mark says. I work in security sales and the vast majority of CCTV cameras are very sensitive to IR. Quite a few of them have built in IR diodes to illuminate the area they are viewing. Large IR illuminators effective up to 500 or more feet are used to flood areas so cameras can easily see while visible light is turned off to reduce light pollution.

Indeed, this may of may not work, depending on the camera, but are a few flaws in the “it works with a remote control” argument; it only works if you aim it directly at the camera lens. You could use a more wide-angled LED, but that means you won’t get the intensity you need to sufficiently over-expose the CCD.

I wonder if you’re better off in general using a bright UV source – even if the CCD doesn’t directly register it, you can generate enough radiative noise to effectively render faces indistinguishable. And if the CCD doesn’t register the source directly, you can walk around with one without the operators/viewers knowing the source…

Camera blocking glassesreddit

@John Ridley The voltage that an LED requires depends on the type, with short wavelengths (UV, blue) requiring higher voltages than long wavelengths (red, IR). 1.5 volts is quite sufficient for an IR LED.

This may work for defeating some inexpensive security cameras, but digital SLR cameras (weapon of choice for paparazzi) won’t be so easily beat.

What they do not say is the other reason it will probably not work against high end cameras be it SLR’s or Video recorders is that the optics of your camera has to be pointed towards their scanner. So using an appropriate lens with a very narrow field of view from the right angle will probably defeat their system as well.

Luckily, this is what most people who don’t know what they are doing screw up, along with proper current control, so the laser pointers they produce aren’t very dangerous, and the diodes burn out very quickly.

They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.

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Have fun and if you realy do want to stop a CCTV dead in it’s tracks, get hold of one of the older green laser pointers and take the wavelength converter crystal out of it which leaves you with a laser diode with 50mW or more output, focus this through a cheap “telescope” (golf range finder) and point it directly at the CCTV camera lens. The result if close enough is to damage the camera sensor in cheaper CCTVs at other ranges it can effectivly jam it in the same way as having a spotlight pointed in your face.

For consumer grade cameras the filters, though present, aren’t that good. This is a neat idea and would work in the majority of cases for obscuring your face but (as others have noted) would certainly draw attention to you.

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