Optical superimposition of infrared thermography through video projection

Abstract This paper presents a novel infrared thermography visualization technique where a sequence of captured thermal images is optically and simultaneously superimposed onto the target object via video projection in real time. In conventional thermography visualization, observers have to frequently move their eyes from the object to a 2D screen where a thermal image is displayed. In contrast, the heat distribution of the object’s surface emerges directly onto its physical surface in the proposed method. As a result, the observer can intuitively understand the object’s heat information just by looking at it in the real space. This paper explains the methods of geometric registration and radiometric compensation of the captured thermal image, which are required before video projection. Furthermore, several projection results are shown to validate the intuitiveness and usefulness of the proposed visualization method.