A Simple Mutual Information based Registration Method for Thermal-Optical Image Pairs applied on a Novel Dataset
This work addresses the need for affordable thermal-optical image registration for researchers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing mutual information techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of registering thermal and optical images without expensive pre-registered hardware by proposing a computationally lightweight mutual information-based method, and introduces a new dataset from two thermal imagers covering five classes including the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela over two years.
While thermal optical registered datasets are becoming widely available, most of these works are based on image pairs which are pre-registered. However, thermal imagers where these images are registered by default are quite expensive. We present in this work, a thermal image registration technique which is computationally lightweight, and can be employed regardless of the resolution of the images captured. We use 2 different thermal imagers to create a completely new database and introduce it as a part of this work as well. The images captured are based on 5 different classes and encompass subjects like the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela, one of the largest public fairs in the world, captured over a period of 2 years.