Thermography is an efficient way of detecting the thermal problems of the roof as a major part of a building's energy dissipation. Thermal images have a low spatial resolution, making it a challenge to produce a three-dimensional thermal model using aerial images. This paper proposes a combination of thermal and visible point clouds to generate a higher-resolution thermal point cloud from roofs of buildings. For this purpose, after obtaining the internal orientation parameters through camera calibration, visible and thermal point clouds were generated and then registered to each other using ground control points. The roofs of buildings were then extracted from the visible point cloud in four steps. First ground points were removed using cloth simulation filter (CSF), and then vegetation points were eliminated by applying entropy and redgreen-blue vegetation index (RGBVI). Geometric features and a segmentation step were considered to filter roofs from other parts. Finally, by combining visible and thermal point clouds, the generated point had a high spatial resolution along with thermal information. In the achieved results, the thermal camera calibration was performed with an accuracy of 0.31 pixels, and the thermal and visible point clouds were registered with an absolute distance of < 0.3 m. The experimental results showed an accuracy of 18 cm for automated extraction of building roofs and 0.6 pixel for production of a high-resolution thermal point cloud, which was five times the density of the primary thermal point cloud and free from distortions.
Abstract. Thermography is a robust method for detecting thermal irregularities on the roof of the buildings as one of the main energy dissipation parts. Recently, UAVs are presented to be useful in gathering 3D thermal data of the building roofs. In this topic, the low spatial resolution of thermal imagery is a challenge which leads to a sparse resolution in point clouds. This paper suggests the fusion of visible and thermal point clouds to generate a high-resolution thermal point cloud of the building roofs. For the purpose, camera calibration is performed to obtain internal orientation parameters, and then thermal point clouds and visible point clouds are generated. In the next step, both two point clouds are geo-referenced by control points. To extract building roofs from the visible point cloud, CSF ground filtering is applied, and the vegetation layer is removed by RGBVI index. Afterward, a predefined threshold is applied to the normal vectors in the z-direction in order to separate facets of roofs from the walls. Finally, the visible point cloud of the building roofs and registered thermal point cloud are combined and generate a fused dense point cloud. Results show mean re-projection error of 0.31 pixels for thermal camera calibration and mean absolute distance of 0.2 m for point clouds registration. The final product is a fused point cloud, which its density improves up to twice of the initial thermal point cloud density and it has the spatial accuracy of visible point cloud along with thermal information of the building roofs.
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