Dense thermal 3d point cloud generation of building envelope by drone-based photogrammetry

Abstract

Recently there are growing interests on the energy conservation and emission reduction. In the fields of architecture and civil engineering, the energy monitoring of structures is required to response the energy issues. In perspective of thermal monitoring, thermal images gains popularity for their rich visual information. With the rapid development of the drone platform, aerial thermal images acquired using drone can be used to monitor not only a part of structure, but wider coverage. In addition, the stereo photogrammetric process is expected to generate 3D point cloud with thermal information. However thermal images show very poor in resolution with narrow field of view that limit the use of drone-based thermal photogrammety. In the study, we aimed to generate 3D thermal point cloud using visible and thermal images. The visible images show high spatial resolution being able to generate precise and dense point clouds. Then we extract thermal information from thermal images to assign them onto the point clouds by precisely establishing photogrammetric collinearity between the point clouds and thermal images. From the experiment, we successfully generate dense 3D thermal point cloud showing 3D thermal distribution over the building structure © 2020 by author(s).