Preliminary experiments on thermal emissivity adjustment for face images

TL;DR

This paper explores the importance of emissivity adjustment in thermal face imaging, introduces a new dataset with varying emissivity, and discusses applications like temperature correction, privacy protection, and improved temperature detection.

Contribution

It provides a new set of thermal face images with different emissivity values and discusses practical applications of emissivity correction in thermal imaging.

Findings

Emissivity adjustment improves temperature measurement accuracy.

Low emissivity can be used for privacy protection.

The dataset enables research on emissivity correction methods.

Abstract

In this paper we summarize several applications based on thermal imaging. We emphasize the importance of emissivity adjustment for a proper temperature measurement. A new set of face images acquired at different emissivity values with steps of 0.01 is also presented and will be distributed for free for research purposes. Among the utilities, we can mention: a) the possibility to apply corrections once an image is acquired with a wrong emissivity value and it is not possible to acquire a new one; b) privacy protection in thermal images, which can be obtained with a low emissivity factor, which is still suitable for several applications, but hides the identity of a user; c) image processing for improving temperature detection in scenes containing objects of different emissivity.