Also heavy rain would be a problem for regular cameras. Not just seeing through the airborne droplets, but also (at a guess far more significantly) the water directly in contact with the windscreen causing severe random distortions.
I built a hacky prototype, combining:
- FLIR thermal camera
- 3 different small cameras manually set at different settings, models chosen for their qualities handling light levels.
Those 4 live feeds were fed into a small black magic design quad layout device, that turned them into a single hd feed via hardware/real-time. That was fed into a hardware capture, that stacked the quad arrangement, applied some other filters and did hardware compression. At that point almost no latency was introduced but had a nice working base video feed. That was fed into the Linux box for processing.
The quad device created a sort of super hdr video, and the thermal layer took it to the next level. All of the cameras had drawbacks, but combined they were minimized.
https://youtu.be/s-8cYj_eh8E?t=22m39s