Fast Automatic Visibility Optimization for Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization

In this letter, we describe and validate the first fully automatic parameter optimization for thermal synthetic aperture visualization. It replaces previous manual exploration of the parameter space, which is time-consuming and error-prone. We prove that the visibility of targets in thermal integral images is proportional to the variance of the targets' image. Since this is invariant to occlusion, it represents a suitable objective function for optimization. Our findings have the potential to enable fully autonomous search and recuse operations with camera drones.