Does D400 camera have any requirement for thermal ?

[shige]

We consider to use D400 and Nuitrack SDK. Our use case is,

• 1 by 1 people hand tracking and gesture recognition.
• User is various people.
• Tracking is into W(1000mm) x D(2000) x H(1500) area.
• Many thermal and light source near the subject.  (Video projector, LED illuminations, LCDs, etc)

We are worried about thermal or light source by other devices bring to lower precision.

Especially, I am worried about thermal effect, because D400 cams use IR cams.

Are there any thermal requirement for tracking.

[MartyG]

The official recommended internal operating temperature for the 400 Series cameras is 35 degrees C (though in practice you might be able to go to 42 degrees before problems start occurring). If a heat rise is gradual then you should not be able to damage the camera, as it has safety controls that will first halve the camera's laser power if a certain temperature threshold is reached, and then shut the camera off if the high temperature occurs for a sustained period after that. If the camera is in a closed room with a lot of equipment that emits heat during operation then you should certainly be mindful about the overall room temperature.

In regard to something changing color on the IR spectrum because of its heat emissions, I could foresee this being picked up by the camera. For example, RealSense cameras once had a heart-rate estimator that worked out a figure for a living person's current heart rate by analyzing the brightness of the blood under the skin. This could be an issue if you were planning to track based on a color on the IR image, but shouldn't affect depth readings as far as I know.

If the light-sources are situated around the object being observed rather than right beside the camera then there may be some small localized negative effects on the IR image caused by illuminations or by reflections of the light off the surfaces of objects that the camera is observing. An example is a computer monitor whose screen may appear as mostly white on the IR image rather than showing the detail of what is on the screen. Typically, the localized light output from an electronic device would not have a significant effect on the image though (it would take a stronger light-source in the vicinity of the camera such as a lamp or a bright ceiling light to do that).

You can purchase IR filters to apply over camera lenses to change the properties of the light going into the IR imager if necessary.