Portable recording system for spherical thermography and its application to longwave mean radiant temperature estimation

Abstract

Mean radiant temperature (MRT) is the primary metric of radiant heat exchange between a human body and the environment, and it dominates human thermal comfort and heat stress. This study develops a new portable recording system for spherical thermography utilizing only commercial devices (an infrared thermal imaging camera and a portable rotation platform) and image processing for panorama synthesis. We use the system to estimate the MRT in a longwave radiation environment. A spherical thermal image is generated by synthesizing 24 source images on the basis of feature point identification. The longwave MRT and plane radiant temperature can be estimated from the spherical thermal image using image projection methods, including the orthographic projection and Lambert cylindrical projection. To validate the developed system, measurements were made using the system in outdoor and indoor environments with various radiant temperature distributions, including sunny built spaces and a tree-shaded space, and the results were compared with those obtained using pyrgeometers. The difference in longwave MRT between the estimation by the developed system with orthographic projection of spherical thermal images and the measurement by pyrgeometers for six directions was within 1 °C in most cases and 1.6 °C at maximum. The results show that the developed system has sufficient accuracy for longwave MRT estimation while evaluating the radiant temperature distribution and radiant asymmetry of spaces.