Hot or Not? Robust and Accurate Continuous Thermal Imaging on FLIR cameras

Wearable thermal imaging is emerging as a powerful and increasingly affordable sensing technology. Current thermal imaging solutions are mostly based on uncooled forward looking infrared (FLIR), which is susceptible to errors resulting from warming of the camera and the device casing it. To mitigate these errors, a blackbody calibration technique where a shutter whose thermal parameters are known is periodically used to calibrate the measurements. This technique, however, is only accurate when the shutter’s temperature remains constant over time, which rarely is the case. In this paper, we contribute by developing a novel deep learning based calibration technique that uses battery temperature measurements to learn a model that allows adapting to changes in the internal thermal calibration parameters. Our method is particularly effective in continuous sensing where the device casing the camera is prone to heating. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique through controlled benchmark experiments which show significant improvements in thermal monitoring accuracy and robustness.