A1. Infrared Thermography, Concept & Process
Infrared thermal images are acquired by thermographic cameras which detect radiation in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum and produce images that visualized the intensity of the radiation. Since all objects above the absolute zero emit infrared radiations, thermography is quite useful in acquiring informative images of the environment with or without visible illumination. The thermographic device used in this work is equipped with a color camera which can be used to capture the shapes and colors of objects within the scene. In the proposed method, we intend to perform 3D reconstruction of the object using the acquired color images.
The accuracy of the reconstructed 3D models can be improved by providing more details of the extracted contours, improving the accuracy of the estimated view angle, and most importantly acquiring more images of the object from different view angles, covering as much of the object as possible. The shape from contours method does not require sophisticated setup and equipment and can be readily applied to our purposes. In our application, the thermal imager takes regular 2D colour images and the thermal images of the object simultaneously, making image acquisition a one-step procedure. The rest of the processing can then be performed offline