A Simple Mutual Information based Registration Method for Thermal-Optical Image Pairs applied on a Novel Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, computationally efficient mutual information-based method for registering thermal-optical image pairs, validated on a novel diverse dataset including large public event imagery.

Contribution

The work presents a new lightweight registration technique applicable across various resolutions and introduces a novel thermal image dataset from diverse classes and a major public event.

Findings

Method is computationally lightweight and resolution-independent.

New dataset includes thermal images from diverse classes and a large public event.

Effective registration demonstrated on the novel dataset.

Abstract

While thermal optical registered datasets are becoming widely available, most of these works are based on image pairs which are pre-registered. However, thermal imagers where these images are registered by default are quite expensive. We present in this work, a thermal image registration technique which is computationally lightweight, and can be employed regardless of the resolution of the images captured. We use 2 different thermal imagers to create a completely new database and introduce it as a part of this work as well. The images captured are based on 5 different classes and encompass subjects like the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela, one of the largest public fairs in the world, captured over a period of 2 years.