Automated rapid thermal imaging systems technology

Abstract

A major source of energy savings occurs on the thermal envelop of buildings, which amounts to approximately 10% of annual energy usage in the United States. To pursue these savings, energy auditors use closed loop energy auditing processes that include infrared thermography inspection as an important tool to assess deficiencies and identify hot thermal gradients. This process is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. I propose fundamentally changing this approach by designing, developing, and deploying an Automated Rapid Thermal Imaging Systems Technology (ARTIST) which is capable of street level drive-by scanning in real-time. I am doing for thermal imaging what Google Earth did for visual imaging. I am mapping the world's temperature, window by window, house by house, street by street, city by city, and country by country. In doing so, I will be able to provide detailed information on where and how we are wasting energy, providing the information needed for sound economic and environmental energy policies and identifying what corrective measures can and should be taken. The fundamental contributions of this thesis relates to the ARTIST. This thesis will focus on the following topics: * Multi-camera synthetic aperture imaging system * 3D Radiometry * Non-radiometric infrared camera calibration techniques * Image enhancement algorithms - Hyper Resolution o Kinetic Super Resolution - Thermal Signature Identification - Low-Light Signal-to-Noise Enhancement using KSR