Multimodal Registration and Fusion for 3D Thermal Imaging

3D vision is an area of computer vision that has attracted a lot of research interest and has been widely studied. In recent years we witness an increasing interest from the industrial community. This interest is driven by the recent advances in 3D technologies, which enable high precision measurements at an affordable cost. With 3D vision techniques we can conduct advanced manufactured parts inspections and metrology analysis. However, we are not able to detect subsurface defects. This kind of detection is achieved by other techniques, like infrared thermography. In this work, we present a new registration framework for 3D and thermal infrared multimodal fusion. The resulting fused data can be used for advanced 3D inspection in Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT&E) applications. The fusion permits the simultaneous visible surface and subsurface inspections to be conducted in the same process. Experimental tests were conducted with different materials. The obtained results are promising and show how these new techniques can be used efficiently in a combined NDT&E-Metrology analysis of manufactured parts, in areas such as aerospace and automotive.