Show HN: I shot high-res stitched panoramas in Iceland using a thermal camera

Have you tried any other thermal cameras and how did they compare?

That photo with the icelandic horses - how did you pull that off with a QVGA-resolution thermal camera + stitching? Animals tend to move...

I was wondering this too, the author added this info via a reply in the comments (of his site/article , not HN)-

> Author here. The camera was a Seek RevealPro which has 320x240 resolution. The thermal data in the panoramas are stitched together from raw data exported by the camera and represented as color (hue+saturation, as per scale in upper right, represents temperature data).

The brightness channel is piecewise-linearly combined with a corresponding visual image taken with a regular SLR to provide a visual reference of what you're looking at.

OP here. Seek RevealPro. I added a top-level comment with some more details and links :)

Looks really nice. I see one for sale in the US. $4k though.

I wonder how much imaging technology has been held back by ITAR.

This would be better than FLIR's MSX, which generally suffers from a lack of precise alignment of the thermal and optical images, particularly for shots with a lot of depth of field.

Pure thermal would have been quite smudged. IMHO the B&W adds really nice context - and it sounds like it's not just a straight overlay, but he's recoloring the B&W pixels, which I think provides a crisper result.

I'm curious what resolutions you've worked with, if you don't mind sharing. High frame rate thermal cameras (above 9hz) are ITAR restricted. Hi-res above 640x480 is not common on the consumer market and is restricted to embargoed countries. Cooled thermal cameras are restricted too IIRC.

Don't commercial thermal imaging cameras also do a thermal/visible composite? Would those also not count as thermal images?

OP here -- I added a top-level comment with some more links. In particular you can find the separate thermal and visible images on the repo: https://github.com/dheera/iceland-thermal

By that metric, most of the NASA images you see are "drawings" as well. I worked on imaging systems for various NASA spacecraft, and most of the published images are false-color, albedo-adjusted, averaged mosaics of many imaging sources from different orbital passes over months or years. Images of people and everyday things are heavily-processed as well, using techniques like HDR and color correction. Photography has always involved this sort of technical manipulation.

The sensor needs a lot more energy. This produces two types of IR cams: actively and passively cooled. The passive cooling is easy to take around with you but only possible with a smaller sensor.

As for the price per pixel: I don't know from memory.

I think it's a combination of physics (wavelength is 20x larger than visual light, making optics and sensors trickier) and export control, as you could (literally) weaponize a high-res thermal camera to make an autonomous drone/missile targetting hot exhaust etc.

Thermal cameras measure much larger waves (7-14 microns as described in the article), and their sensitivity to amplitude is high.

A major limiting factor in camera sensor resolution is signal to noise ratio. It is well known that if you bump up the "ISO" (light sensitivity) to make photographs at night, you see more noise. The higher the sensor resolution, the smaller each photosite and therefore the less signal (fewer photons) captured in the short time of one exposure.

Larger sensors can solve this problem but these are CMOS devices whose cost increases superlinearly with area (like microprocessors, see die yield). Most customers won't accept dead pixels.

Economics is also a major enabler of kilobuck 50 MP visible light cameras, miracles though they are. Industrial users aren't going to re-buy all their cameras every few years like DSLR users do.

As I recall, IR sensors are also much more expensive to produce, as in, 1Kx1K is already a very large array and costs thousands of $. So any ordinary consumer is not likely to be using something with very high resolution.

This is just slighly informed, please prove me wrong.

The major market so far seems to have been tactical/military, so they have focused on framerates rather than resolution. And then the US blocked high framerates for civilian use...

(edit: the US blocked civilian exports.)

Visible wavelength cameras rely on relatively cheap CMOS sensors. CMOS processes have been squeezed for efficiency for decades to make, for example cheap DRAM.

The technologies behind thermal cameras are very different because they need to be sensitive to wavelengths 10x longer than visible light (the silicon in CMOS is basically completely insensitive to light above 2 um, whereas thermal cameras need to image at ~10 um). The pixels are effectively microbolometers and rely on more exotic materials like Germanium.

Because companys pay so much, so why make an cheaper product.

Mike did a real teardown on a Flir E4 many years ago, and saw (with an oscilloscope), even on the cheap camera with the low resolution, the chip has the full resolution. I think one week later the camera was hacked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtqUE67BUDI

Microbolometer pixels are big and expensive compared to CMOS pixels.

Photographer here ;)

I took some artistic liberty in choosing color scales for each photo (a) to make them look unique (b) to make people actually look at the color scale (c) because as someone with a physics background it bothers me deeply that people associate hot with red and cold with blue and even go so far as to call 6000K "cool white" and 3000K "warm white" when those are literally blackbody temperature equivalents. So I flipped it around on one shot :)

That and the associated optics.

There’s some reason for encouragement however. I bought a Seek Pro, with 320x240 resolution, on sale for $350 earlier this year. The app is pretty terrible unfortunately and the camera physical construction is flimsy, but the imager seems to be of reasonable quality for the price point.

Couple of examples: https://imgur.com/a/ZGsOwUm

Yes I do covet them. Getting cheaper but still fairly low resolution. Keep hoping for a tipping point like digital cameras where cheap decent sensors will suddenly be everywhere. Not yet though.

I bought one on eBay a few years ago for about £300, but it sucked so I got rid of it. It used a traditional camera to draw most of the image (itself already quite low-res), and just highlighted even-more-low-res temperature data in blue and red.

I'd imagine demand for thermal imaging has skyrocketed due to covid, so its possible the tech will get better and cheaper.

It's $570:

https://www.amazon.com/Seek-RQ-AAA-Thermal-Revealpro/dp/B07B...

I think that yes they isolate floors too and it looks like the front of the house leaks more heat than then roof.

> (Note: Glass windows are opaque to thermal cameras; the temperature measured here is the surface temperature of the window.)

This is not completely correct. Glass tends to reflect infrared radiation. For example if you view a car windscreen from the air with a thermal camera, you'll see a reflection of the sky.

It's more complicated than that, because you'll also detect the emitted blackbody radiation from the glass (for whatever temperature).