Integration and evaluation of the high-precision MotionCam-3D into a 3D thermography system

Abstract. Infrared thermal imaging enables fast, accurate and non-contact measurement of temperature distributions. However, 2D representations of 3D objects often require several images to provide significant information. For such cases, 3D thermograms allow a quick temporal and spatial analysis. In this paper, the integration of an industrial high-precision 3D sensor into a 3D thermography system is presented. The performances of the existing and new systems are assessed and compared by analyzing 3D thermograms of an industry-related test object. The geometry of the obtained point cloud is evaluated by means of a non-referenced point cloud quality assessment approach. It is shown that, in the presence of the spatial resolution and the local curvature, the proposed system performs significantly better than the existing one.