Dear all,

I work with thermal imaging to create public artworks, often involving hundreds of people. I currently user a FLIR A20V with the wide angle (45 degree) lens, but I'm finding this is still to narrow a field of view for some applications. This is the widest lens FLIR makes for this camera, so I'm wondering about other cameras. They used to make an 80 degree lens for the A40V, but that seems to have been discontinued. Does anyone know of another camera, 160x120 minimum resolution, with the option of a really wide lens? The A20V works well in every other respect for me, it's just this lens issue that's causing a problem. I don't need an on-camera screen, photo-taking ability, ruggedisation or fancy software: just a video output and some form of remote control for sensitivity (I use RS232 on the A20V at the moment)

 Thanks for your help, 

Tom 

Tom I don't know of one but I am more interested in you work. I do the same thing for my self more of a hobby than anything. Is there a website I can go to and look at your work? I have always thought that there would be a market for this.

Regards

 

 

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Jeremy Kays Reliability Technician
Level II IR, MCA Level I, In Compliance with the ASNT guidelines
The Snell Group
jkays@thesnellgroup.com
http://www.thesnellgroup.com

Hi Jeremy - you can see some of my work at http://www.kma.co.uk - the large outdoor pieces use thermal imaging for motion tracking rather than for the image itself, so you won't see much that looks like a thermal image in most of our work.

 Cheers

 Tom 

Fascinating! I like it. We are just now in the middle of a Level I course and the students today brought back some amazing "art" images from the Scavenger Hunt activities.

 My associate, Jacques Frate, who teaches for Snell Infrared Canada has perfected the technique of creating mosaic images. The attached image of a very large transformer is, I believe, 24 images from a 320x240 camera that have been "stitched" together in PowerPoint. While it is a technical image, I also think of it as artwork! Clearly this requires a great deal of patience AND some great base images. It is like having a wide angle lens on a very high resolution camera.

 Keep us informed about your work please.

 

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Thermally Yours,

John
ASNT NDT Level III #48166
The Snell Group
www.thesnellgroup.com
www.thermalsolutions.org
800-636-9820

Mayb an IR Art section?

 

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Jan Arthur VanZelfden
Reliability Engineering
SKF Reliability
at SAPPI Fine Paper
Muskegon MI

This is a panorama study taken with a Flir P65 using a wide angle lens.  It was stitched together in excel.

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Jan Arthur VanZelfden
Reliability Engineering
SKF Reliability
at SAPPI Fine Paper
Muskegon MI

Very Nice!!! It is always nice when the work we do is so fun you hate to quit at the end of the day.

 

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Jeremy Kays Reliability Technician
Level II IR, MCA Level I, In Compliance with the ASNT guidelines
The Snell Group
jkays@thesnellgroup.com
http://www.thesnellgroup.com

Tom:

I love your art application!

FLIR Systems, Inc. makes a lot of different imagers/lens options. I will assume you checked it out well and cannot get a wider lens than 45 degrees. If you like the equipment that you have and you don't want to change imagers, you should first check the used equipment market for the wider lens. Mikron Infrared (LumaSense)  sells a 53x40 lens ( http://www.mikroninfrared.com/literature/SpyglassLens_datasheet.pdf ), but you have to invest in their imager also, as I think it would be tough to adapt anyone else's lens on the A20.

If you can live with capturing the images, instead of using the video-out option...You could use your imager and modify the saved images with software like Adobe PhotoShop. As far as the pano software, there are many inexpensive, off-the-shelf, software suites for creating mosaic imagery. However, stitching IR imagery together seemlessly is not as easy as stitching photo imagery (especially many images) because generally there is much less information for the software, like AutoPano to recognize and put together. There are tricks to anything, including stitching software so it will take some practice. We use five programs to stitch IR images because sometimes four out of five will not work, but the fifth one will. One other idea that I though of...PTLens might work for you. By imputing false lens info, you could fool the software into adjusting the image to super wide angles.

I hope this helps you.

Greg S.

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Greg Stockton
Stockton Infrared Thermographic Services, Inc.
8472 Adams Farm Road
Randleman, NC 27317-7331
(800) 248-SCAN (toll-free)
(336) 498-GREG (voice)
(336) 689-3658 (cell)
www.StocktonInfrared.com

Jan, a question about your merged pictures in Excel.  Were these merged as pictures, or are they merged radiometric data?

Thanks

-john

Thanks people for your replies: it's great to find such a responsive community out there on the web. The applications that I create rely on manipulating the live video stream coming from the camera, so although the stitching technique is hugely impressive, it couldn't work for my particular needs. I have spoken to FLIR again about this, and it turns out that whilst their website no longer has reference to the A40V, it is still in production, and can be bought with an 80 degree lens: exactly what I need. The only drawback being the price, which is hugely more than the A20V + 45 degree lens we've been using so far. I should have a look around on the second hand market, although from looking at the forums on this site, A40V cameras don't come up very often.

 Thanks again for your advice,

 Tom 

 John,  the images were merged as pictures.  There was an effort to find the best single fit for level and span throughout the panorama data.  Once this was achieved the images were copied to excel where they were tweaked slightly for size to make good interlocking fits. 

The construction site panorama is a collection of several separate images.  I was working with a beginning thermographer and we were using the study to consider solar gain on various materials at the site.  We went back to the office with the collected data to demonstrate the value of the stitching application.  I have used this technique to construct panoramas of things such as boiler and process furnace walls where shots are taken in close proximity over the expanse.  Often the result is somewhat skewed by point of reference but the overall result is understandable.  This application also works well with tighter subject areas like power circuits in an electrical panel, following a path from feeder to T-leads. It provides detail of the circuit and keeps the subject of interest front and center in the imagery.  It can be time intensive! 

I first learned of this technique from Greg McIntosh at the Snell Mechanical Equipment Inspection seminar.  He had a composite image of a building inspection in a presentation and was happy to share just how the intricate image was created. 

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Jan Arthur VanZelfden
Reliability Engineering
SKF Reliability
at SAPPI Fine Paper
Muskegon MI

I cannot speak to the quality or reliability of the following, nor do I have any direct experience with it, but, there is software called snapdv which creates a panorama from a video.  The home page has disappeared, but I think both version 1.0 and 1.1 are available from various download sites.  Do a google search if this is what you need, vs. a wide angle lens.

Jack

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Jack M. Kleinfeld, P.E.
Kleinfeld Technical Services, Inc.
Bronx, NY
718-884-6644
JKEngineer@KleinfeldTechnical.com
come see what we can do for you: http://www.KleinfeldTechnical.com

John Horrigan:

Jan, a question about your merged pictures in Excel.  Were these merged as pictures, or are they merged radiometric data?

Thanks

-john

 

The data loses it's radiometric attributes when you bring it into Excel and create a fused image. 

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Thermally Yours,

John
ASNT NDT Level III #48166
The Snell Group
www.thesnellgroup.com
www.thermalsolutions.org
800-636-9820

Hi John.  Happy August.

Depending on how you export/import the image data, it is possible to have the radiometric data in Excel for plotting and manipulation outside of the manufacturer software.  In my case it required a bit of macro writing and VBA programming to assemble the file in a format that my plotting package could work with, but the image quality is virtually identical to the home software.  What I could not do, due to the limitations in Excel's rows, was merge datasets in Excel, so I had to resort to merging plots visually.  I was wondering if Jan had worked around that limitation.

Fortunately, Excel 2007 has a million row limit now, so merging raw data might be better.  Here is a png of a multi-image composite, merged with radiometric data intact, so I could change the palette and temp ranges for the composite together.  This is a rough version, thrown together for illustration so the scale is crunched on the right, but it should do.  Imager was a Ti25 (160 x 120). The palette is a custom blue red grey to show up the temp range of interest.

Cheers

-John

John

Very impressive and I must say a novel approach to solving this issue! I would not be surprised if you are the first person to have done this.

 

R.

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Rory Paul
Independent Level II Thermographer
Barak Systems
www.baraksystems.com