Suggestions for improving video performance when driving at night

[ogzogz]

@viofo @VIOFO-Support

I would like to reiterate here the suggestion that I have been talking about for a long time, which I think will improve video quality performance during night driving.

The effect of headlight type on image quality varies when driving at night.
I think that the warm yellow tone used in halogen headlights varies with the performance of an LED used in projector headlights.
The white LED tone adds coldness to the video, and since its lumen value is high, the contrast difference between the dark and illuminated areas is significantly different compared to halogen.

How can we try?
If your vehicle has LED white headlights and you have a halogen fog lamp, you can experience the difference in the image when you turn on the fog lamp while your camera is recording.

In summary, the IQ regulated for camera image recording should be regulated for night driving. And in order to be a professional camera, a more functional recording can be achieved by selecting the vehicle headlight type from the camera menu. For this, a night driving test must be done with two different headlight types under the same conditions and the necessary toning work can be achieved.
and as a result, better results can be achieved by selecting the headlight type in the camera settings.
I'm waiting for your ideas for this.

 

[Nigel]

I'm waiting for your ideas for this.

I suspect that the colour doesn't have much effect on the result.
The brightness does have an effect, especially on the HDR at night.
Some LEDs are brighter than others, so you can't just have a Halogen/LED setting, you need a Headlamp Brightness setting.

Maybe it would be better to use some of that AI in the dashcam to automatically adjust to the best HDR exposure settings to give the most readable plates for your headlamps, and then as your headlamps age, or get dirty, or covered with snow, it can re-adjust as needed...

 

[ogzogz]

I suspect that the colour doesn't have much effect on the result.
The brightness does have an effect, especially on the HDR at night.
Some LEDs are brighter than others, so you can't just have a Halogen/LED setting, you need a Headlamp Brightness setting.

Maybe it would be better to use some of that AI in the dashcam to automatically adjust to the best HDR exposure settings to give the most readable plates for your headlamps, and then as your headlamps age, or get dirty, or covered with snow, it can re-adjust as needed...

Thanks for information.
It cannot be said that I made this determination directly due to a problem with my headlights. I also watched many test videos. Frankly, my vehicle has halogen headlights as standard equipment. I replaced it with full LED headlights at the service. So this is not a light bulb replacement. I started thinking about the before and after situation where the difference between halogen and projector design was obvious.

Obviously LED always creates an artificial brightness. No matter how high the lumen value is, a second factor here is the headlight (cutoff) line. The headlight line is quite sharp in projector headlights (I'm not talking about installing LEDs in halogen design headlights). However, it provides slightly higher illumination than halogen headlights. This means a smoother transition.
Another disadvantage of this sharp line is that it becomes difficult to create high-mounted backplates as it reduces contrast. Therefore, taking this sharp transition into consideration, a solution can be produced by making the contrast transition a little grainier and avoiding full black.

It is true that headlight colors affect the image in some way.

 

[Dashmellow]

I would love to see traditional dash cam developers like @viofo take a few cues from the Mobius platform and add more sophisticated exposure controls.

For "improving video performance when driving at night" perhaps we could have a bright light setting and a low light setting that could easily be switched by the user, A really cool thing would be the ability to use voice control to switch between bright light and low light and back again on the fly at will, depending on the driving circumstances.