Best spray paint for IR (NIR) CCD Camera?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

While flat black will have high emissivity and would be great for working in the far infra-red where you are monitoring the heat given off by an object, if you are using something like the "Night-Shot" mode on a Sony Handycam, you are actually more concerned about IR reflectivity.

It's not obvious to the eye, but many black paints are reflective in the infrared. They get their dark color because they absorb visible light, but the mix of pigments isn't chosen for anything outside that range of wavelengths. True "blackbody" black is very hard to come by.

Similarly, many white paints are actually pretty good at absorbing IR.

I once saw a mention of an IR-reflective paint in an article about home theaters. It was gold-colored.

[Elgin Clock]

Are you restricted to a painted surface? Can you use a vinyl material?

I'm sure some folks who responded before me already can shed some info on the subject, but in our world of robotics on this forum, our camera we used which tracked color had a lot better success with a lighted surface than a vinyl surface than a painted one.

The camera tracks light awesome (most of the time). - Best medium so far.

Vinyl (which was reflective enough) semi-decent.
(My team personally had good luck with this the first year that medium was introduced as a tracking material)

Paint (on cardboard, or wood) was horrible to track.

I don't know if the camera you are referring to tracks the same as ours, so hopefully the engineers/mentors/teachers who responded before me can relate this somehow.