Calibration of Low-Resolution Thermal Imaging for Human Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Thermal imaging has recently come to light to measure high human body temperature (fever) in responses to the global public health issues. This is normally achieved by very expensive high-resolution thermal cameras. Lately, there has been a new commercial low-resolution thermal sensor array (TSA) that has gained growing interest in indoor human monitoring applications due to their low-cost and human privacy-preserving claims. However, there has not been sufficient independent empirical calibration of low-resolution TSA and high-resolution images for human-centred applications. This letter provides empirical calibration of low- and high-resolution thermal imaging techniques in terms of their visible outputs, accuracy in temperature values, and stability. Besides, this letter assesses the claimed privacy-preserving feature of TSA by experimentally validating the possibility of revoking the human identity from the TSA’s output. Thus, this letter aims to understand better the advantages, limitations, and future trends of using TSA in human monitoring applications.