Full thermal panorama from a long wavelength infrared and visible camera system

Abstract

We present a method of constructing a full thermal panorama from a collection of images taken by a long wavelength infrared and visible camera system. Due to recent development in joint stereo calibration, our method is able to project a thermal image onto a corresponding visible image. After both images are in the same domain, panoramic projection from visible images can also be applied to thermal images. Our method also extends the scope of the projection function by allowing nonzero distance between center of rotation and optical center of rotating camera as well as arbitrary camera’s primary axes that are no longer parallel to the world axes. We show that our method works on a dataset with various camera movements and compare our results with standard software made specifically for a visible panorama and a thermal panorama. Furthermore, we are able to combine thermal panoramas of the same scene with a simple calculation. With an addition of guided upsampling, we can simultaneously improve thermal image resolution and field of view with a single run of the method.