L. St-Laurent, D. Prévost, X. Maldague "Fast and accurate calibration-based thermal / colour sensors registration" QIRT 10 - 10th International Conference on Quantitative Infrared Thermography, July 27-30, Quebec, Canada, Paper 126, 2010
Abstract: Combination of thermal and electro-optical sensors is useful in numerous applications related to inspection and
monitoring. A few manufacturers already offer hybrid thermal / colour cameras. However, those off-the-shelf products
generally provide independent images from both sensors whereas an accurate pixel-by-pixel registration would be greatly
beneficial for most applications. This paper presents a calibration-based approach allowing the acquisition of co-registered
thermal / visible videos with a simple side-by-side camera configuration. The proposed method has the interesting
capabilities of accurately registering both fields of view by a single image mapping More specifically, this mapping converts
distorted image coordinates from thermal image to corresponding distorted image coordinates of colour image. Once
computed, the projection matrix can be optimized for a specific object distance. An original calibration rig optimized for the
thermal spectrum is also presented.
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