3D Thermal Mapping Using a 2D Laser Rangefinder and a Thermal Camera

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost 3D thermal modeling tool consisting of a laser rangefinder and a thermal camera. We utilize a two dimension laser rangefinder with the aid of a steering gear to get a 3D point cloud. Furthermore, the 3D point cloud is fused with infrared images captured by the thermal camera. As a result, a 3D thermal model containing spatial and temperature information is constructed. For better recognizing the entities, the sparse 3D model is enhanced by greedy projection triangulation algorithm before visualizing. The tool is built and evaluated in real scenes. The experimental results show that our tool can reconstruct the three-dimension thermal model of an environment successfully.