Recording image / video of very bright target

Hi everyone!

I’m trying to record a video of a very bright target (think molten metal), approximately 8 feet away from my camera. Unfortunately, when I try to record the footage, I get a lot of glow off the target, which makes the images useless for my intended purpose. The auto-exposure does not seem to handle this scenario very well. I think it is trying to balance the bright target with the surrounding (much darker) environment.

I’m looking for a way to force the camera to focus on the brightest part of the image, similar to pointing a cellphone camera at a lightbulb and tapping on the lightbulb - the cellphone camera focuses on the lightbulb, removing the glow and making the shape more clear, while making the surrounding area darker.

I apologize that I don’t have the formal language to describe my problem but hopefully this is clear. I’m using a Jetson Nano 2GB Dev Model + Raspberry PI Camera V2.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

You may tell more about how you are capturing.
Is it a CSI bayer sensor throuch argus ?
Or a USB camera ?
Are you using gstreamer or v42 or else ?

If using CSI camera through argus, you may try set fixed gain setting gainrange and fixed ispdigital gain setting ispdigitalgainrange, set wbmode to off and awblock to true. You may also disable other auto-tuning…
For gstreamer nvarguscamerasrc, you may check options with:

gst-inspect-1.0 nvarguscamerasrc
1 Like

Thank you Honey_Patouceul.

I am using a raspberry pi camera over CSI through nvarguscamerasrc.

Following your guidance, I set fixed gain and exposuretimerange, which achieved the desired result. Here are the ranges I used:

gainrange=1 1
ispdigitalgainrange=1 1
exposuretimerange=300000 300000

Sorry for the slow response. I really appreciate the guidance!