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Night-Vision Camera

HERCULES adds a configurable night-vision (NVG) camera with an empirical photometric transfer that reproduces the characteristic low-light, image-intensified look — enabling nighttime perception and exploration experiments.

Night-vision rendering of a desert scene

What it models

  • Empirical photometric transfer mapping scene luminance to the intensified night-vision response.
  • Configurable low-light behavior for nighttime flights and drives.
  • Complements the LWIR thermal camera for combined thermal + low-light sensing, and the dynamic phenomena for scenarios such as fires observed at night.

Usage

The night-vision camera is exposed as camera image type NightVision = 12, synthesized server-side from Scene + Segmentation captures rendered in the same simGetImages batch (same frame, lockstep-safe) and captured through the standard Image APIs:

responses = client.simGetImages([
    airsim.ImageRequest("front_center", airsim.ImageType.NightVision, False, False)
])

For the fused scene-luminance look, the Scene and Segmentation captures must share the same resolution in the settings file (otherwise the camera falls back to a pure thermal-map view). Gain, blend, and seed are configurable via the SyntheticCameraSettings block — see Synthetic IR / NVG Cameras for the full reference and troubleshooting. See Sensors for the complete sensor list and Camera Views for viewport configuration.