HDR Video Camera for Automotive Use

I want to put a video camera into my car so I can have it take photos and video for my car blog.

I would want it to have maybe 24 hours of recording time set up so it it erases the oldest footage automatically. It would be set up so that it talks to the main computers in the house at night when the car is in the garage and moves any video footage over. I may have a button on the dash to flag important parts, such as an interesting car, license plate, or somebody doing something stupid.

The hardest part of this is getting video of stuff at night. The camera would either adjust for the darkness and the lights would completely blow out the image, or the camera would adjust for the lights, and everything else would be pitch black.

I am thinking that the video source could possibly alternate between the 2 extremes, every other frame. Basically half the frames would be balanced for the darkness, and the other half would be balanced for the lights. You could then take any 2 frames and create a High Dynamic Range HDR a composite image together to create an image that is usable. You could even possibly HDR merge a video together merging each frame into the following frame. It may be easiest to just cut the final frame rate in half if this was done.

I don’t know if the camera CCDs are tuned at the hardware level or by software.

Maybe 2 cameras placed very close together so the parallax is minimal? Have the cameras manually set to +4 and -4 or something? No, probably would need to be hard set for night time traffic. Maybe 3 cameras, one allowed to auto-adjust, and the other two set up for night.

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