3D Reconstruction from IR Thermal Images and Reprojective Evaluations

Infrared thermography has been widely used in various domains to measure the temperature distributions of objects and surfaces. The methodology can be further extended to 3D applications if the spatial information of the temperature distribution is available. This paper proposes a 3D infrared imaging approach based on silhouette volume intersection to reconstruct volumetric temperature data of enclosed objects. 3D IR images are taken from various angles and integrated with 2D RGB images to effectively reconstruct a 3D model of the object's temperature distributions. Various automatic thresholding methods are also compared and evaluated by reprojection scoring to systematically assess the effectiveness and accuracy of the different approaches. Experiment results have demonstrated the ability of the system to provide an estimate to the 3D location of an internal heat source from images taken externally.