Mutual Calibration for 3D Thermal Mapping

Three-dimensional digital heat distribution maps are needed to assess the energy efficiency of real estates. The availability of such maps are of great importance for reducing the ecological footprint of houses, buildings, and factories. Designing estates has reached the point, where so-called Passivhaus buildings make extensive use of the intrinsic heat from internal sources such as waste heat from lighting, white goods, and other electrical devices, but without using dedicated heaters. In our approach for creating high-precise heat distribution maps a robot is equipped with a 3D laser scanner, a thermal camera, and a color camera. Data from all the sensors are combined to model the environment precisely. This paper describes the setup of the sensors and the processing of the acquired data, including the automatic co-calibration needed to fulfill this task.