Spatial projection of thermal data for visual inspection

Since the advent of thermal imaging, devices with a high optical resolution that use detector arrays to capture the emitted radiance in the thermal infrared range of an entire scene simultaneously have developed as a standard in monitoring energy related aspects. They have had a huge impact on the building industry and in manufacturing, where they are commonly used to monitor proecces that require stable temperature conditions. As beneficial as contactless measurements are, the subsequent localization of points of interest in the environment is often difficult. To overcome this problem we propose a portable system that combines thermal imaging with Augmented Reality (AR). The idea of the approach is to project the gathered temperature information back into the scene to facilitate visual inspection.