On Obtaining Reliable Spatial Information from Gas Structures with a Stereo Camera System

Spotting and localizing unwanted harmful gas releases is of great interest for the maintenance of facilities in the chemical, oil, gas and biogas industry due to their economic impact and negative effect on the environment. In this regard, stereo gas camera systems have been proposed in the literature for obtaining spatio-temporal information from gas releases. These permit gas localization and tracking. Nevertheless, these works rely on a photo-consistency assumption that holds for most textured opaque objects in the visual spectrum but not necessarily for semi-transparent continuous textures such as gases. In this work, first, a detailed measuring model for gaining gas structure's spatial information with a stereo camera is proposed. A disparity calculation method and a quality measure is then implemented and tested for finding correspondences in stereo images of continuous textures. The proposed measuring model is tested and validated with the implemented disparity method and using synthetic and real stereo images sequences. The results indicate that the computed spatial information from gas structures approximates reliably the path-averaged and concentration-weighted gas position regarding the perspective of the stereo camera system.