A thorough understanding of halo formation and its possible control is highly desirable for essentially all particle accelerators. Particles outside the beam core are not only lost for further experiments, they are also likely to hit the drift chamber and thereby activate the beam pipe, which makes work on the accelerator costly and time consuming. A well-established technique for transverse beam profile measurements is the observation of synchrotron radiation, optical transition radiation or the like. A particular challenge, however, is the detection of particles in the tail regions of the beam distribution in close proximity of the very intense beam core. Results from laboratory measurements on two different devices are presented that might form the technical base of a future beam halo monitor: the novel SpectraCam XDR camera system which has an intrinsically high dynamic range due to its unique pixel design, and a flexible masking technique based on a DMD micro mirror array which allows for a fast mask generation to blank out the central core
