Waymo Patents a Camera That Floods the Dark with Invisible Light

By Patentlyze Team · Updated Jul 3, 2026

Waymo has filed a patent for a compact camera module that uses near-infrared LEDs to illuminate a scene without any visible light, essentially letting its cars see in the dark without blinding anyone around them.

What Waymo's infrared camera module actually does

Imagine driving down a pitch-black street. Your headlights only reach so far, and cameras that rely on visible light struggle badly once the sun goes down. Waymo's patent describes a way to fix that problem for self-driving vehicles without adding bulky, expensive hardware.

The design packs a wide-angle "fisheye" camera and a set of infrared light emitters into a single compact housing. The infrared light is invisible to the human eye, so it can flood the area around the car with illumination that the camera picks up clearly, no glare for other drivers, no bright flashing lights on the outside of the vehicle.

To make the lighting as even as possible, the housing itself is made partly from a material that lets infrared light pass through, with a pattern of tiny lenses built into the surface to spread the light out uniformly. The result is a camera that can see its surroundings in complete darkness using a clean, self-contained unit.

How the NIR LEDs and fisheye lens work together

The patent describes a camera module built around three core components packed into one housing: a fisheye lens (an ultra-wide-angle optic that captures a very broad field of view), an image sensor that responds to both visible and near-infrared (NIR) light, and a set of NIR light emitters (LEDs that output light just beyond what the human eye can detect).

The arrangement is specific: the fisheye lens sits in a central opening, and the NIR emitters are placed on either side of it so their light axes run parallel to the camera's optical axis. That geometry is designed to minimize shadows and give the sensor a consistently lit view of whatever is in front of it.

The outer housing surrounding the lens is made from a NIR-transparent material, meaning the LEDs can shine outward through the housing walls rather than through a separate window or exposed aperture. Waymo takes this a step further by adding a light-diffusing microstructure, essentially a grid of tiny lenses molded into the inner surface of that transparent section, to scatter the infrared light evenly across the scene rather than leaving hot spots directly in front of each emitter.

The image sensor is described as sensitive to both visible and NIR wavelengths, which gives the system flexibility to operate in daylight (using visible light) or darkness (using the onboard infrared illumination) from a single unit.

What this means for self-driving cars at night

Self-driving cars need to perceive their surroundings reliably at all hours, and cameras are one of the primary ways they do that. Nighttime and low-light conditions are a well-documented weak spot for camera-based perception systems. A self-contained module that provides its own infrared illumination removes the dependence on streetlights or headlights, which means more consistent sensor input regardless of the environment.

The compact, integrated design is also practically significant. Packing the illumination source and camera into a single housing with a diffusing front cover keeps the unit small and weather-resistant, important qualities for hardware that has to survive mounted on the outside of a vehicle year-round. Whether this ends up in a future Waymo vehicle or gets licensed outward, it addresses a real engineering challenge rather than a theoretical one.

Editorial commentary on a publicly published patent application. Not legal advice.