Long Range 3D with Quadocular Thermal (LWIR) Camera

Abstract: Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) cameras provide images regardles of the ambient illumination, they tolerate fog and are not blinded by the incoming car headlights. These features make LWIR cameras attractive for autonomous navigation, security and military applications. Thermal images can be used similarly to the visible range ones, including 3D scene reconstruction with two or more such cameras mounted on a rigid frame. There are two additional challenges for this spectral range: lower image resolution and lower contrast of the textures. In this work, we demonstrate quadocular LWIR camera setup, calibration, image capturing and processing that result in long range 3D perception with 0.077 pix disparity error over 90% of the depth map. With low resolution (160 x 120) LWIR sensors we achieved 10% range accuracy at 28 m with 56 degrees horizontal field of view (HFoV) and 150 mm baseline. Scaled to the now-standard 640 x 512 resolution and 200 mm baseline suitable for head-mounted application the result would be 10% accuracy at 130 m.