Thermal Imaging

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Overview

Thermal imaging studies how infrared measurements can reveal temperature, structure, motion, and material properties when visible-light cameras are limited or privacy is important. Methods range from radiometric calibration and heat-transfer inversion to deep learning for detection, segmentation, denoising, and super-resolution; RGB-thermal fusion, vision-language models, and thermal SLAM extend these capabilities to reasoning and 3D mapping. Applications include wildfire monitoring, industrial inspection, medical sensing, and human perception, evaluated on settings such as FLIR and RGBT-Scenes as well as radiometric UAV and active-thermography data. A central challenge is making results reliable across sensors and environments: models must distinguish true temperature evidence from emissivity, atmospheric, and imaging effects, while paired data and temperature-grounded model reasoning remain limited.

Latest papers

CardsList

77 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, up 56% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Revealing Imaging Characteristics of Thermal Wakes from Underwater Vehicles Without Cooling-Water Discharge

    Oct 26, 2026Guoyi Zhang, Yanjin Du, Guangsheng Xu +16Underwater Object DetectionMaritime Surveillance

    School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, 518107, Guangdong, China · Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130033, Jilin, China · Institute of Machinery Manufacturing Technology, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Mianyang, 621900, China +3

  2. Tracking Is Not Sensing: Artifact-Aware Thermal Video Respiration Estimation in Head-Free Marmosets

    Oct 24, 2026Penghao Wang, Sen Yang, Fenghua Xie +2Thermal Imaging

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology +1

  3. The Paired Thermal Channel Is Two Orthogonal Axes: A Controlled Attribution Study of Calibration Cost and Detection Gain in Infrared Person Detection

    Oct 23, 2026Tian Zhang, Yang Chen, Bing Bai +3Infrared Object DetectionThermal Imaging

    School of Information Engineering, Shandong Management University, Jinan, China. · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · School of Aeronautics, Shandong Jiaotong University, Jinan, China. +1

  4. Broadband Mid-Wave Infrared Imaging Enabled by All-Silicon Hyperboloid Metalens

    Oct 21, 2026Rose Johnson, Debabrata Mandal, Zihao Zou +6Computational ImagingImage Reconstruction

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. · Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, USA. · Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

  5. Failure Modes of Vision-Language Models for Human Activity Understanding in Thermal HRI

    Oct 21, 2026Han Hu, He ChenHuman Activity RecognitionVLMs for Robotics

    Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.

  6. Velocity Optimization via Thermal Imaging Enhances Autonomous Tumor Resection

    Oct 20, 2026Naveed D. Riaziat, Jiawei Ge, Ethan Kilmer +6Surgical RoboticsFeedback Control

    Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland · Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland

  7. VTF900: A 900-Subject Visible-Thermal Face Recognition Dataset and Benchmark

    Oct 17, 2026Jacob Abaare, Bianca Ianetta, Cedric Nimpa Fondje +2Face RecognitionThermal Imaging

    University of Nebraska-Lincoln · AeroVironment · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory +1

  8. GTSM: Gaussian Splatting with Thermal State-Space Dynamics for Spatio-Temporal Thermal Field Reconstruction and Prediction

    Oct 17, 2026Yunpeng Zhao, Haoxiang Zhang, Chao LiuSpatiotemporal ForecastingThermal Imaging

    Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  9. PCDFusion: Proposal-Context-Detail Bayesian Rendering for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

    Oct 16, 2026Rui Liu, Lin Gu, Hesong Li +1Infrared-Visible Image FusionMulti-Source Image Fusion

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan

  10. ScalLoc: Continuous Oblique Thermal UAV Geo-Localization with a 2D Satellite Map

    Oct 10, 2026Xiaoran Zhang, Yu Liu, Jinyu Liang +1Cross-View Geo-LocalizationGNSS-Denied Localization

    College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China

  11. Towards Privacy-Preserving Thermal Human Perception from Dataset to Deployment

    Oct 10, 2026Kailai Sun, Yue Cui, Xinwei Wang +8Thermal ImagingInfrared Object Detection

    Urban Mobility Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States · Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre (SMART), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Singapore 138602 · Chongqing General Hospital, Chongqing University, Chongqing 401147, China +4

  12. TAP3D: Thermal-Assisted 3D Human Point Clouds

    Oct 8, 2026Xie Zhang, Chengxiao Li, Xuan Liu +13D Human ReconstructionPoint Cloud Generation

    The University of Hong Kong

  13. AstraSR: Real-World Thermal Super-Resolution with GPT-6 Astra

    Oct 5, 2026Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Jun Zhang +3Thermal ImagingImage Super-Resolution

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

  14. TIRMamba: A Thermal-Prior-Modulated State-Space Network for Sub-Million-Parameter Infrared Image Super-Resolution

    Oct 4, 2026Chun-An Lin, Tsung-Jung Liu, Yen-Chieh OuyangThermal ImagingEfficient Neural Network Inference

    Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402202, Taiwan · College of Computing and Informatics, Providence University, Taichung 433303, Taiwan

  15. Oracle headroom without signal: null-calibrated evaluation of candidate selection for thermal heart rate estimation

    Oct 1, 2026Mohammad Rakibur Rahman, Nhi Nguyen, Sasan Sharifipour +4Heart Rate EstimationSelection Bias

    Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), University of Oulu, Finland

  16. Synthetic Thermal Image Generation for Real-Time Animal Detection Under Low-Visibility Conditions

    Sep 26, 2026James Momoh, Khandaker Mamun AhmedInfrared Object DetectionThermal Imaging

    The Beacom College of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Dakota State University

  17. Passive LWIR Hyperspectral Ranging via Transmittance Extraction and Distance Alignment

    Sep 24, 2026Zhihe Chen, Chen Fan, Shuo Liu +4Thermal ImagingRemote Sensing

    College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410073, China · College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

  18. Seeing the Heat: Synthesizing High-Resolution Wood Thermal Responses from Optical Imagery

    Sep 22, 2026Jingren XieMaterials Property PredictionThermal Imaging

  19. Dynamic Thermal Gaussians: Multimodal 4D Gaussian Splatting

    Sep 21, 2026Rongfeng Lu, Lifeng Lin, Xiaobao Wei +7Thermal Imaging3D Gaussian Splatting

    Lishui University Lishui, China Lishui Key Laboratory of Low-Altitude Multimodal Sensing and Intelligent Computing Lishui, China · Hangzhou Dianzi University Hangzhou, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China +2

  20. Aligned Radiometric RGB-Thermal Fusion for UAV Facade Anomaly Screening

    Sep 11, 2026Yuan Yang, Shulei Li, Haobo LiangThermal ImagingInfrared-Visible Image Fusion

    Hong Kong Center for Construction Robotics, Hong Kong SAR, China

  21. SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generation

    Sep 9, 2026Anjith George, Adam Unal, Sebastien MarcelThermal ImagingSynthetic Data Augmentation

    Idiap Research Institute Rue Marconi 19 Martigny, Switzerland · University of Lausanne (UNIL) Lausanne, Switzerland

  22. Text2Thermal: Physics-Aware Thermal Image Synthesis from Textual Priors

    Sep 3, 2026Tayeba Qazi, Brejesh Lall, Prerana MukherjeeThermal ImagingConditional Image Generation

    Bharti School of Telecommunications Technology and Management, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Delhi, India · School of Engineering, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India

  23. UAV Thermal Imagery for Inert Ordnance Screening: Multi Campaign Dataset Development,Object Detection, and Practical Recommendations

    Sep 1, 2026Chad Melton, PhD., Annabelle KeltonThermal ImagingObject Detection

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA.

  24. Physical Adversarial Examples for Person Detectors in Thermal Images Based on 3D Modeling

    Aug 31, 2026Xiaopei Zhu, Siyuan Huang, Zhanhao Hu +3Thermal ImagingAdversarial Patch Attacks

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR), Beijing 100010, China

  25. Computational Depth Measurement in Thermographic Video: Overcoming Spatial Overfitting via Spatio-Temporal Decoupling

    Aug 29, 2026Zain Ul Abidin, Habeeban Memon, Junaid AhmedNon-Destructive TestingDepth Estimation

    Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Sukkur IBA University, Sukkur, Pakistan

  26. Representation Is Not Enough: Body-Localized Thermal Evidence for Contactless Stress and Craving Sensing in Opioid Use Disorder

    Aug 17, 2026Sachin Deb, Harshit Sharma, Asif SalekinWeakly Supervised LearningThermal Imaging

    Arizona State University

  27. Repurposing RGB-based Foundation Model for Depth Estimation on Thermal Images Using Hierarchical Supervision

    Aug 12, 2026Jie Hong, Tingtian Li, Xuesong Li +1Thermal ImagingCross-Modal Knowledge Distillation

    CI3 Lab, Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Canberra, ACT, Australia

  28. IRPol-Fuse: Energy-structure coordination for infrared polarization fusion under low visibility

    Aug 8, 2026Zhuangfan Huang, Chusheng Fang, Xiaosong Li +3Thermal ImagingMultimodal Fusion

    Guangdong-HongKong-Macao Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Technology, School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Foshan University, Foshan 528225, China · Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Intelligent Inspection Technology, Foshan University, Foshan 528225, China

  29. Real-time physics inversion for retrieval of sub-pixel wildfire temperatures from VSWIR imaging spectroscopy

    Aug 4, 2026William R. Keely, Philip G. Brodrick, Katherine Mistick +3Thermal ImagingRemote Sensing

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, CA, United States of America · School of Environment, Society & Sustainability, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States of America

  30. Material-Segmented Per-Pixel Emissivity Correction for Thermographic Anomaly Detection in Cultural Heritage Digital Twins

    Aug 3, 2026Jonathan Klingspon, Scott McAvoy, Maurizio Seracini +1Thermal ImagingAnomaly Detection

    University of California, San Diego · San Diego State University