Thermal Airborne Optical Sectioning

Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, Oliver Bimber

Research output: Contribution to journalComment/debate

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We apply a multi-spectral (RGB and thermal) camera drone for synthetic aperture imaging to computationally remove occluding vegetation for revealing hidden objects, as required in archeology, search-and-rescue, animal inspection, and border control applications. The radiated heat signal of strongly occluded targets, such as a human bodies hidden in dense shrub, can be made visible by integrating multiple thermal recordings from slightly different perspectives, while being entirely invisible in RGB recordings or unidentifiable in single thermal images. We collect bits of heat radiation through the occluder volume over a wide synthetic aperture range and computationally combine them to a clear image. This requires precise estimation of the drone's position and orientation for each capturing pose, which is supported by applying computer vision algorithms on the high resolution RGB images.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1668
Number of pages1
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume11
Issue number14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jul 2019
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Computational imaging
  • Drones
  • Light fields
  • Occlusion removal
  • Synthetic apertures
  • Thermal imaging

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