Hacking the T2S+ Out of Fear: Get Lock-In Thermography for Free

I guess that's one way to implement industrial espionage.

Build telemetry and malware, or code that can become malware with a little tweaking or remote checks, into a component that's likely to be used by technologists in whatever sector you're interested in.

Make it a bit better and a lot cheaper than all the alternatives. Get on their phone with lots of permissions, and use the telemetry. Once you know who they are you can decide on more targeted actions to turn them into a vector against their employer or whoever, or just watch what you can to collect information.

But the technical detail provided seems to be enough to make it easy for someone else to reproduce the whole setup. And provides ample evidence that you should, because the provided drivers are evidently malware.

Oh, and apparently you get a free FPGA with your thermographic sensor!

Fun fact, Sony does the same once in a while for dead-pixel detection and remapping on their mirrorless cameras [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579634

That's actually better. In-camera processing will just reduce the amount of information you can get out of the sensor. For example, even if it does exactly the same flat-fielding as you do, the in-camera flat-fielded image has to be requantized to 8-bit format before sending to the computer, therefore losing precision.

You can get even better accuracy by taking a dark or bias field (might be possible if you can set the exposure time to something very short, but this might not be possible with these thermographic cameras) and taking flatfields at different temperatures, so you can get per-pixel linearity curves. That's a lot of work though, and ideally each camera was indiviually calibrated by the producer, but I am guessing that is not done for these cheap cameras.

Can anyone from FLIR lobby on this?

Cool stuff though once you get past that.