Thermal reality capturing with the Microsoft HoloLens 2 for energy system analysis

Abstract

Using digital methods to analyze the often highly complex structures of technical building equipment (TBE) holds great potential for identifying energy savings. For digitizing TBE, we evaluated the Microsoft HoloLens 2 (MHL2), since it promises to be a mobile and cost-effective solution and found that the MHL2 can be a suitable instrument for as-built acquisition, depending on the use-case’s accuracy requirements. The depth sensor of the MHL2 operates in a low single-digit centimeter accuracy range, while the position tracking inaccuracy is more significant. Furthermore, we extended the acquisition system with an external thermal camera to generate both, RGB and thermal point clouds. Additionally, we built a custom 3D calibration setup that allows us to calibrate both cameras in parallel and achieve promising accuracies for the level of detail of the resulting RGB and thermal point clouds and thus for the energy system analysis approach.