3-D IR imaging system for heat spot tracer

Two-dimensional (2-D) infrared thermography (IRT) has been widely used in various domains. The methodology can be further extended to 3-D applications if the spatial information of the temperature distribution is available. In this paper a 3-D infrared imaging system based on Silhouette Volume Intersection has been proposed to reconstruct the volumetric temperature data. The method first calibrates the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the IR sensor; the poses of the sensor are then used to estimate the rotation axis of the turntable. By means of the estimated parameters, the system is able to calculate the rigid transformation of the sensor with respect to a measured object which is placed on a turntable and viewed from different directions. Once the sensory parameters and viewing directions are acquired, we apply the Silhouette Volume Intersection algorithm to the 2-D IR images to produce a volumetric thermal accumulation. In the experimental results we demonstrate that the method can effectively identify the source of heat in 3-D space.