Image matching algorithm for thermal panorama image construction adaptable for fire disasters

In a fire disaster in a tunnel, people should be rescued immediately using the information obtained from cameras or sensors. However, in heavy smoke from a fire, people cannot be clearly identified by a mounted CCTV, which is only effective in a clear environment. A thermal camera can be an alternative to this in smoky situations and is capable of detecting people from their emitted thermal energy. On the other hand, the thermal image camera has a smaller field of view than an ordinary camera due to its lens characteristics and temperature error, etc. In order to cover a relatively wide area, panoramic image construction needs to be implemented. In this work, a template-based similarity matching algorithm for constructing the panorama image is proposed and its performance is verified through experiments. This scheme provides guidelines for coping with difficulty in image construction, which requires an exact correspondence search for two images in cases of heavy smoke.