Abstract
Active thermography (AT) is a widely studied non-destructive testing method for the characterization and evaluation of biological and industrial materials. Despite its broad range of potential applications, commercialization and wide-spread adaption of AT has long been impeded by the cost and size of infrared (IR) cameras. In this paper, we demonstrate that this cost and size limitation can be overcome using cell-phone attachment IR cameras. A software development kit (SDK) is developed that controls camera attributes through a simple USB interface and acquires camera frames at a constant frame rate up to 33 fps. To demonstrate the performance of our low-cost AT system, we report and discuss our experimental results on two high impact potential applications. The first set of experiments is conducted on a dental sample to investigate the clinical potential of the developed low-cost technology for detecting early dental caries, while the second set of experiments is conducted on the oral-fluid based lateral flow immunoassay to determine the viability of our technology for detecting and quantifying cannabis consumption at the point-of-care. Our results suggest achievement of reliable performance in the low-cost platform, comparable to those of costly and bulky research-grade systems, paving the way for translation of AT techniques to market.
Highlights
Active thermography (AT) is a widely studied non-destructive testing method for the characterization and evaluation of biological and industrial materials
To study the advantages and limitations of developed software development kit (SDK) platform over manufacturer’s software, comparative lock-in thermography (LIT) experiments were carried out using the IR camera frames captured via developed SDK and those directly captured by the SEEK APP (Seek Thermal Inc.; Santa Barbara, CA) hosted on an Android Google Pixel 4 cellphone
These spectra suggest that the presence of disruptions in the acquisition of frames by manufacturer software results in the appearance of erroneous frequency components in the frequency domain, while the spectrum of the signal acquired by developed SDK shows a single dominant peak at the modulation frequency of the laser
Summary
Active thermography (AT) is a widely studied non-destructive testing method for the characterization and evaluation of biological and industrial materials. In that initial work[29], the performance of the developed LIT system was limited by the slow and inconsistent frame rate of the camera (~15 fps) as well as the disruptions in the image acquisition due to frequent execution of cell-phone attachment camera’s native calibration and non-uniformity correction procedures In this manuscript, we report on the development of a reliable software development kit (SDK) which enables control of camera attributes and offers reliable acquisition of frames at constant frame rates of up to 33 fps through a simple USB interface. To demonstrate the feasibility of conducting reliable AT with a low-cost cellphone IR camera, in sections below, after discussing the significance of performing LIT at high frame rates, we present and discuss our experimental results on two high impact areas of detecting early stages of demineralization in human dental enamel and detection and quantification of cannabis in oral fluid
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