Thermal Image Reconstruction Using Deep Learning

Abstract

A high-resolution thermal camera is very expensive and is thus difficult to be used. Furthermore, thermal images become blurred in various cases of object motion, camera shaking, and camera defocusing. To solve these problems, a previous super-resolution restoration (SRR) technique converting a thermal image acquired by a low-resolution camera into a high-resolution one, and a thermal image deblurring method have been researched. However, existing studies were performed based on 1-channel (grayscale) images. In addition, a large-sized and whole image has been used in the existing thermal image deblurring methods, which causes lower deblurring performance. In this study, we propose novel SRR and deblurring methods. The proposed deblurring method is conducted based on small region images. The proposed methods are also conducted using 3-channel (color) thermal images and generative adversarial networks. In addition, the performances of this method are compared in various color spaces (RGB, Gray, HLS, HSV, Lab, Luv, XYZ, YCrCb), image sizes, and thermal databases. Through experiments using self-collected databases and open databases, it was confirmed that the proposed methods show better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.