Transformations in the Photogrammetric Co-Processing of Thermal Infrared Images and RGB Images

Abstract

The photogrammetric processing of thermal infrared (TIR) images deals with several difficulties. TIR images ordinarily have low-resolution and the contrast of the images is very low. These factors strongly complicate the photogrammetric processing, especially when a modern structure from motion method is used. These factors can be avoided by a certain co-processing method of TIR and RGB images. Two of the solutions of co-processing were suggested by the authors and are presented in this article. Each solution requires a different type of transformation–plane transformation and spatial transformation. Both types of transformations are discussed in this paper. On the experiments that were performed, there are presented requirements, advantages, disadvantages, and results of the transformations. Both methods are evaluated mainly in terms of accuracy. The transformations are presented on suggested methods, but they can be easily applied to different kinds of methods of co-processing of TIR and RGB images.

Keywords

• photogrammetry
• thermal infrared image
• thermal camera calibration
• relative pose estimation
• close-range photogrammetry