I got tired of SLS false positives, so I built a professional alternative.
Hey everyone,
I wanted to share something I’ve been developing. For context, my day job involves capturing images in some of the most unforgiving, pitch-black environments on the planet. I deal with high-end camera sensors, optics, and spatial data for a living, so my tolerance for bad tech is pretty low.
Like a lot of you, I've always been incredibly skeptical of the current gear in this field. Watching investigators use repurposed gaming sensors designed for well-lit living rooms has always frustrated me. The false positives are off the charts. If a shadow moves or a chair is shaped weirdly, the software guesses it's a person. That's not evidence; that's a glitch.
I needed something bulletproof for a major field project I’m currently shooting, so I engineered my own Windows-based system. I call it Specter.
I know a lot of you already own Kinects, as do the investigators on our project, so I built Specter to run perfectly fine on the existing hardware. But to be transparent, I designed this software from the ground up to take advantage of professional-grade depth sensors like the Intel RealSense D435i. It also accepts direct video input from night vision or ultra-lowlight cinema cameras.
During our latest field investigation, I paired the Intel sensor with a Sony FX3 in absolute darkness. I’m not here to drop a slick marketing pitch, but I genuinely cannot explain the data we recorded. I've stared at production monitors for thousands of hours in my career, and the spatial mapping we captured on this run genuinely shook me. It’s the first time I’ve looked at anomalies and couldn't immediately debunk them as technical errors or sensor artifacts.
Because I have to prove our findings to producers, I couldn't just have a stick figure dancing on a screen. Specter takes simultaneous 2D and 3D snapshots of the environment. When you catch an anomaly, you can physically drill down into the 3D spatial data after the fact to verify exactly what was in the room.
I'll be able to share the actual field evidence as soon as the project's NDA lifts and the episodes air later this year, but I wanted to get the software into the hands of serious investigators now.
Because of the architecture required to process this level of data without the noise, it's not cheap. The software is $399. It’s built specifically for those of you who are tired of second-guessing your gear and want the same caliber of data analysis the professionals are using behind the scenes.
Let me know if you have any questions about the hardware integrations or anthing else.
Check out the field guide for technicals
https://specter-imaging.com/help/field-guide