INFRARED: QUESTIONED DOCUMENT EXAMINATION, TURNING YOUR MOBILE PHONE INTO AN INFRARED CAMERA AT NO COST

MOBILE PHONE TO
INFRARED CAMERA

A Document Examination Tool

OBSCURED WRITING

INFRARED RADIATION

The above images show a good example of IR radiation and its capabilities. Words and letters can be almost totally obscured and yet under the right lighting conditions and with the right camera equipment, this is what Infrared can do.

Sadly, the cost of such equipment is out of range for many of us so we have to find other ways.

AFFORDABLE INFRARED: MOBILE PHONE TO IR CAMERA 

3 STEPS TO TEST AND INSTALL

It may not sound right but it is a fact,  many mobile phones are already infrared capable. True to say that manufacturers do block IR on most of their models but the block, it turns out, isn't that effective. To be more precise the proper term is 'near-infrared'.

Here are a couple of images non SM related to give you an idea of what your mobile can do. I have used my own Samsung S9+ for this exercise.

Step 1. To find out if your mobile can do this job and a simple way to find out is to grab your TV remote point it at your mobile phone camera and then select one of the controls on the remote, volume for example, and through the view screen on your phone you should see something like this:

What you are looking at is the infrared lamp on your remote and you can see it quite clearly. Normally you wouldn't see the coloured lamp because the colour is outside the normal range of human vision. It's infrared. If you see this, then your phone is IR capable.

Step 2. You need to download an app to your mobile phone, it's called 'Seek Thermal', it's free and it is normally used in conjunction with the Seek thermal adapter for your mobile phone which costs around four hundred dollars. You get the app from Google Play and its available for Android and iPhone devices.

Step 3. I discovered this by accident having first tried to take an IR pic through the normal camera option on my phone. Go back to Google Play and install another app called 'Magnifier Plus', you'll find a number of similar apps, you need to select one that has an incorporated flashlight which you can use as an option when taking IR pics if needed.

And that's it, maybe 5 minutes and your IR camera phone is good to go.

I have used this extensively to examine numerous documents from the Somerton Man case, i have published some with more to come.  To boost the performance I have ordered an infrared lens that I can attach to the phone which should result in sharper images.

Below is an IR image of the view from my deck:

 And here is a shot of my hand to give you a better idea of the sort of details Infrared will show up: