Build your own hybrid thermal/EO camera for autonomous vehicle

In this work, we propose a novel paradigm to design a hybrid thermal/EO (Electro-Optical or visible-light) camera, whose thermal and RGB frames are pixel-wisely aligned and temporally synchronized. Compared with the existing schemes, we innovate in three ways in order to make it more compact in dimension, and thus more practical and extendable for real-world applications. The first is a redesign of the structure layout of the thermal and EO cameras. The second is on obtaining a pixel-wise spatial registration of the thermal and RGB frames by a coarse mechanical adjustment and a fine alignment through a constant homography warping. The third innovation is on extending one single hybrid camera to a hybrid camera array, through which we can obtain wide-view spatially aligned thermal, RGB and disparity images simultaneously. The experimental results show that the average error of spatial-alignment of two image modalities can be less than one pixel.