Rapidly developing human heat residue model under various conditions based on Fluent and thermal video

Abstract Thermal residue left by the human body contains a variety of information that is valuable to many application areas such as in forensic and biometrics. All current approaches utilize real-world thermal videos to build models specific to a certain scenario, and there is no universal model or methodology to describe the process of heat transfer. In this work, we propose a numerical simulation method to fill this gap. Based on the characteristics of the thermal video, we have developed a two-dimensional (2D) model for human thermal residue emulation via the Fluent software. Results of validation experiments have demonstrated that the simulation models can effectively imitate the thermal dissipation process in real scenes under different contact materials and contact time. Compared to the models built with real-world data, the numerical simulation method can establish a large number of reliable models suitable for different application environments in a short time, thus significantly reducing labour costs and providing valuable guidance for the actual modeling process. In the arena of public security, the established thermal residue emulation model can assist police to analyze the thermal trace information of perpetrators.