What Is High Sensitivity Mode?

FLIR optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras are highly specialized thermal cameras that are spectrally filtered to visualize specific gas emissions. While FLIR OGI cameras are extremely sensitive and can detect gas leaks up to hundreds of meters away, sometimes a leak that’s particularly small or distant requires something extra to be visualized. Using a feature called high sensitivity mode (HSM), operators can spot even the smallest of leaks.

Enhancing Gas Leak Detection

High sensitivity mode is a patented image subtraction video processing technique that enhances the thermal sensitivity of the camera. The HSM feature subtracts a percentage of individual pixel signals from frames in the video stream from the subsequent frames. This enhances the differences between frames and makes leaks stand out more clearly in the resulting images.

Using HSM gives the user control over the amount of compensation applied to the video stream, and therefore the degree of increase in thermal sensitivity. In the below video, for example, the vapors emitted from hand sanitizer become much more obvious when the camera is switched to HSM: