Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443

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Energy and Buildings

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enbuild

Novel approach to 3D thermography and energy efficiency evaluation

D. González-Aguilera a , P. Rodriguez-Gonzalvez a , J. Armesto b,∗ , S. Lagüela b
a
Politechnic School of Avila, University of Salamanca, Calle de los Hornos Caleros, 50, 05003 Avila, Spain
b
ETSE Minas, University of Vigo, Rúa Maxwell s/n, Campus Lagoas-Marcosende, 36310 Vigo, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper describes a new approach to multi-sensor registration of infrared images and 3D-laser scanner
Received 7 February 2012 models, based on the extraction of common features in the IR image and the range image obtained from
Received in revised form 19 July 2012 a laser-scanner 3D-point cloud. The workflow developed in this paper allows the automatic registration
Accepted 20 July 2012
of two different sensors with completely different characteristics, including fields of view, spatial reso-
lution and spatial position. As a result of the workflow, thermographic and geometric data are combined
Keywords:
in a thermographic 3D-model and its projection as an orthothermogram, where thermal defects can be
Thermal IR camera
visually detected and precisely located, and heat losses can be quantified given the availability of sur-
Terrestrial laser scanner
Sensor registration
face measurements. This approach is applied to different types of constructions and building materials,
Thermographic 3D model showing its efficiency and appropriateness for building inspection and energy studies.
Orthothermogram © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Energy evaluation

1. Introduction such as small cracks; construction fault such as misplacement or

During the last years, there has been an increasing conscience
about energy consumption worldwide. Energy consumption in all
the fields related to the building sector makes up one third of the
total energy consumption, and produces one third of the global car-
bon emissions. For this reason, rationalising energy consumption
in the building sector is a priority in the energy policies of many
different countries, especially in developed and developing ones.
For example, in Europe, in the case of the existing buildings stock, a
reduction of 26% energy use in buildings would mean 11% reduction
of the total energy use [1].
Each building constitutes a different case study, given not only
the different existing geometries and compositions, but also their
occupation, and use and management of the installations. In order
to optimise energy efficiency studies, an exhaustive documenta-
tion and analysis of the buildings are needed [2], including all data
related to the physical reality of the building and also to its thermal
and energy performance.
Infrared thermography has proved to be an adequate technique
in building inspections [3,4], providing a continuous measurement
of surface temperatures, and therefore allowing the study of the
thermal performance of the building, the quantification of heat
losses, and the energy certification of the building. What is more,
infrared thermography allows the detection of structural faults
lack of insulation, and doors and windows sealing; and use effects
as moisture or condensation areas [5–8].
However, integral building inspection also requires geometric
information for the performance of energy efficiency studies, heat
loss quantification and precise defects location in space. This geo-
metric information has to be acquired with a geomatic sensor, as
for example a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS).
Terrestrial laser scanners have been subject of important
advances in the last years, being used in a wide range of
applications, from infrastructures to environment [9,10]. These
instruments provide, in a few seconds, precise and accurate three-
dimensional representations that allow all kind of studies where
geometry is involved: structural, stability, surfaces. Furthermore,
laser scanning is a non-destructive technique, so it can be used
to acquire data from all different installations and constructions,
under construction or rehabilitation, given that they will not suffer
any modification or alteration during the survey [11,12].
Therefore, the combination of both thermographic camera and
TLS provides all the data needed for integral building studies [13],
being an important data source for energy efficiency and simula-
tion studies as temperatures and areas of thermal bridges are an
essential piece of information.
1.1. Previous work

Combination of TLS with other non-destructive techniques can

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 986813423. be found in a large number of published works. As an example,
E-mail address: julia@uvigo.es (J. Armesto). point clouds can be combined with data from a ground-penetrating

0378-7788/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.07.023
 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443
Fig. 1. Thermographic image – laser point cloud registration workflow.
radar (GPR) in order to perform material homogeneity studies [14]
or underground structures detection [15].
In the case of thermography, it can be combined with TLS as a
texture, through the registration of the thermographic images in
the point clouds. This is an essential step in 3D modelling, where
the relationships between different sets of data are defined, fol-
lowed by the integration of the registered sets of data to form
a final hybrid product, such as a thermographic 3D model or an
orthothermogram.
Whereas point cloud texturing with photographs can be found
in published works such as [14,16], the performance of the same
process with thermographies presents more problems due to the
technical characteristics of thermographic cameras and the acqui-
sition requirements to be fulfilled, including large pixel size, which
makes it difficult to collimate details in the images, small image
format, high sensitivity to surface temperature variations and low
sensitivity to surface radiometric reflectivity variations. There-
fore, thermographic images usually have lower resolution and less
pronounced edges than other image modalities. Edges in ther-
mographic images may form due to transition between different
materials or different temperatures. The latter are usually gradual
and are thus difficult to use for registration purposes.
Some published works tried to solve thermographic-point cloud
registration from different approaches [17–19], all of them per-
forming registration between data sets with different dimensions:
2D – thermographic images and 3D – point clouds. In the method-
ology proposed in this work, thermographic-TLS registration is
performed using an image to image registration approach: 3D
points from the point clouds are projected to a 2D range image, so
registration is performed between 2D-thermographic image and
2D-range image. As shown in the workflow in Fig. 1, registration
is performed based on feature (points) extraction in both thermo-
graphic and range image.
This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the basic
multi-sensor image registration methodology; Section 3 presents
437
the experimental results including a thermal analysis; and Section
4 provides the concluding remarks.
2. Multi-sensor image registration: methodology
The multi-sensor image registration methodology (Fig. 1) was
applied in two different steps: (1) both images (camera and range
images) were improved, processed and matched and (2) the co-
registration parameters were computed to guarantee accuracy and
reliability.
2.1. Multi-sensor image pre-processing
For the first level, three different sub-processes were carried out,
including the following: pre-processing of both images, in which
the range and thermographic images were conditioned and pre-
pared; feature extraction, in which interest points were detected;
and matching between both images, in which a pyramidal corre-
spondence strategy was established.
2.1.1. Generation and improvement of the range image
A range image can be considered, from a photogrammetric point
of view, as a central perspective of the acquired object. If the exter-
nal orientation of the TLS is known, then it is possible to establish
the direction and distance in space of each object point that is rep-
resented by a pixel in the image. In particular, the range image
is generated by the application of a projection from the point
cloud, which turns the 3D-point cloud into a 2D image, enabling
the extrapolation of several useful photogrammetric techniques.
The range image contains holes because of an insufficient density
of points. Thus, an interpolation is applied to reduce these influ-
ences. Specifically, an inverse distance weighted interpolator [20] is
applied, which is based on averaging the digital level of neighbour-
ing pixels using their distance as a weight factor. The advantage
of this method relative to others is its simplicity, efficiency and
438 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443
ability to adapt to fast changes in the dataset. The mathematical
expression is shown in Eq. (1):
n
Zi wi 1
Zk = i=1
n , wi = 2
i=1
wi dk,i
where Zk is the digital level of the empty pixel, Zi are the digital
values of the neighbouring pixel, w is the weight factor, and n is the
number of points that participate in the calculation. In particular,
the weight factor is defined as the inverse of the distance between
the object point and ith point. By default, the neighbourhood is
established in an area of 3 × 3 pixels, although it can be modified
by the final user.
Considering that both images have different resolutions, a pla-
nar affine transformation is then applied to the range image (RImg )
to fit it to the camera image (CImg ) as well as possible using Eq. (2).
This transformation is described as:
CImg = RImg × A
⎡ ⎤
a b c
A = ⎣d e f ⎦ 2.3. Multi-sensor image matching
0 0 1
where A contains the affine transformation, for which a and e are
the x-axis and y-axis scale factors, b and d are the rotations that
express the directions in which the x-axis and y-axis scale factors
are applied, and c and f are the translation parameters, respectively.
The goal of the resizing algorithm is to apply a planar affine
transformation to the range images so that they “fit” as much as
possible the camera images. The resulting images are used in the
multi-sensor image registration process.
2.1.2. Radial lens distortion correction of thermographic image
Camera images were corrected for radial lens distortion using
Brown’s model [21], therefore Eq. (3), and sv3Dvision software [22]:
dr = r = k1 r 3 + k2 r 5
where dr is the radial distortion, r is the radial distance and (k1 ,k2 )
are radial lens distortion parameters.
2.1.3. Multi-sensor pyramidal images
Finally, image pyramids were generated in order to work with
several versions of the image with increasing spatial resolutions. A
two-fold step was performed to achieve these image pyramids: (i)
application of a low-pass filter (Gaussian mask) to enable the elim-
ination of high frequency components and (ii) resampling of the
smoothed image in accordance with its spatial resolution. In partic-
ular, image pyramids were used in the registration of both sensors
for coarse-to-fine hierarchical methods based on matching, where
matches obtained at a coarse resolution were used to guide and
limit the search space for the matching of finer-resolution features.
2.2. Multi-sensor feature extraction
The multi-sensor process based on feature extraction from
range and thermographic images is advantageous because of its
simplicity. This process provides abundant information at little
computational cost and with minimal user interaction, thus allow-
ing us to approximate the solution to the matching problem. More
specifically, the developed approach guarantees the robustness of
this method in the case of pattern repetition, which is an aspect
frequently found in architectural scenarios. To this end, an inter-
est point detector was globally applied to the whole images, given
the suitability of interest points to be used in accurate registration
between images despite suffering from noise, occlusions and dis-
continuities. In particular, the Harris operator [23] was utilised as
it is invariant to possible rotations and scale factors. What is more,
this operator exhibits several advantages compared to other alter-
natives, such as high accuracy and reliability in the localisation of
(1) interest points as well as insensitivity to image noise, as this does
not degenerate its performance.
In this work, the threshold of the Harris detector to evaluate
the corner response is established as the relationship between the
eigenvectors of the auto-correlation function of the search window,
using Eq. (4) together with the standard deviation of the Gaussian
mask. Moreover, non-maximum suppression is applied to extract
the interest points.
R = 1 2 − k(1 + 2 ) = |M| − k · trace(M)2 (4)
where R is the corner response parameter, 1 and 2 are the eigen-
values of M, k is an empirical value and M is the auto-correlation
matrix. If R is negative, then the point is classified as an edge. If R
is small, then the point is classified as a flat region. If R is positive,
then the point is classified as an interest point.
(2)
In addition, to determine a multi-sensor image correspon-
dence a combination of different similarity measures and matching
techniques reinforced with additional constraints was developed.
Specifically, feature-based and area-based matching methods were
combined following a hierarchical approach. Area-based match-
ing methods, especially the least squared matching method, have
a very high accuracy potential if well-textured image patches are
used. In this sense, feature-based methods are more flexible with
respect to surface discontinuities, less sensitive to image noise, and
require less approximate values. However, the accuracy of feature-
based matching methods is limited by the accuracy of the feature
extraction process.
The approach presented here follows a coarse-to-fine hierar-
chical matching strategy. This technique starts from low-density
(3) features at the lowest resolution level of the image pyramid and
moves to the highest-resolution level of the image pyramid. Specif-
ically, at the lower levels the matching is performed based on
the proximity and similarity of grey level components within
the neighbourhood, using area-based matching and the cross-
correlation coefficient, defined in Eq. (5), as indicators:
CR
= (5)
C R
where p is the cross-correlation coefficient,  CR is the covariance
between the windows of the camera and range images,  C is the
camera image grey level component deviation and  R is the range
image grey level component deviation. Matching of interest points
is based on proximity and similarity of grey level components
within the neighbourhood.
The last level of the pyramid considers the image with its
real resolution. After the above steps are performed, least squares
matching [24] is applied to the last pyramid level, considering the
results provided by the area-based matching procedure as initial
approximations. The location and shape of the matched window is
estimated with respect to some initial values and computed until
the grey-level differences between the deformed and template
patches reach a minimum, using Eq. (6):
v = F(x̄, ȳ) − G(ax0 + by0 + x + cx0 + dy0 + y)r1 + r0 → min (6)
where F and G represent the reference and corresponding searching
images, respectively, a, b, c, d, x and y constitute the geometric
corrections of a planar affine transformation, while r1 and r0 are
the radiometric corrections (contrast and brightness corrections,
respectively).
 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443
Table 1
Technical characteristics of the terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) used in this work.
Principle Field of Range
view
Trimble GX200 TOF H360◦ 2–350 m
V60◦
Faro Photon 80 CW H360◦ 0.60–72 m
V320◦
Although a hierarchical matching strategy was applied, the
spectral characteristics of both images (especially the range
images) yielded quite incorrect correspondences (mismatches) as
a result, which degraded the final solution. Therefore, an extended
approach was required to obtain precise and reliable results. This
approach was based on an epipolar geometry, as explained in
[25,26] and fundamental matrix defined in [27]. As a result, the
correspondence problem was constrained from a 2D search (the
whole image) to a 1D search (the epipolar line).
2.4. Thermographic camera spatial resection supported by the
Pope test
After the matching process was performed correctly, the com-
putation of the thermographic camera spatial resection was carried
out in order to address erroneous measurements (i.e., outliers),
which cause deviations from the normal distribution and can lead
to a poor or erroneous estimation of the thermographic camera spa-
tial resection. To account for these outliers, a gross error detector
based on the Pope test presented in [28] was incorporated, based
on the least squares method.
Therefore, in the next step the largest error in the spatial resec-
tion calculation (based on the collinearity condition explained in
[29]) is excluded using a technique based on the Pope statistical
test. This approach is based on the assumption that there is only
one single outlier in the measurements (observations).
The statistical principle of the Pope test is based on the eval-
uation of the normalised residuals using the establishment of the
following contrast hypothesis:
H0 : E{wi } = 0 all observations are free from gross errors
Ha : E{wi } =
/ 0 one observation contains a gross error
where wi is the normalised residual for the ith observation.
The statistic value of the Pope test Tp is defined in Eq. (7),
 
 i 
Tp = wi =   (7)
 ˆ 2 i 
0
where ˆ 02 is the posteriori variance, v is the residual value and vi
is the ith element of the variance–covariance matrix of residuals. It
is important to note that the Pope test does not require knowledge
of the a priori deviation of observations.
If the test magnitudes exceed the limits stated in Eq. (8), then
it is accepted that a gross error exists in the related observation
data. In this case, this observation can be eliminated and a new
thermographic camera spatial resection adjustment is made:
|wi | > r,˛
where  is based on the T-student distribution, r is the number
of degrees of freedom and ˛ is the significance level. The whole
process is repeated until no further outliers are located [30].
Although this method exhibits some disadvantages (e.g., only
one outlier is detected within one iteration) that restrict its wider
application, its implementation at this stage is very useful because
only a few outliers persist.
439
Spot size Speed Accuracy Wavelength External
camera
3 mm @ 50 m 5000 points/s 1.4 mm @ 50 m 534 nm (visible-green) N
3.3 mm 120,000 points/s 2 mm @ 25 m 785 nm (near infrared) Y
3. Experimental results
Experiments were carried out to validate the proposed auto-
matic multi-sensor image registration approach of thermographic
camera and terrestrial laser scanner. Two case studies are described
here. Case 1 was a concrete building with an irregular plan. This
building contained rectangular hollows with metal frames that
made up over 25% of the façade surface. Case 2 was a V-plant build-
ing with floors that were arranged at different depths. Its wooden
frames were introduced with metal panels, resulting in an area that
contained about 50% glass. Light entering the interior is one of the
key factors in the architectural design of these buildings. However,
the hollow glass frames are a major source of energy loss in the
buildings due to thermal conductivity of glass, framework contrac-
tion, lack of tightness and cracking of seals. Thus, we chose to study
these two types of buildings, including their construction materials
and different levels of glazing.
Through the cases of study presented here, we tested two dif-
ferent TLS’s (Table 1) over two different types of construction. The
TLS’s were chosen due to their different spectral characteristics and
because of other features of minor importance, including scanning
speed, range and principle of measurement.
The experimental validation was divided into four parts: (i)
multi-sensor image pre-processing; (ii) multi-sensor image feature
extraction and matching; (iii) multi-sensor image registration; (iv)
thermographic 3D models and orthothermogram generation.
Thermal IR images were captured using a FLIR ThermaCAM
SC640 thermographic camera. This is a high-performance instru-
ment characterised by 0.65 mrad spatial resolution (about 1 cm
at 30 m distance), 0.1 ◦ C thermal resolution and equipped with a
640 × 480 pixel array having a field of view (FOV) of 24◦ (H) × 18◦
(V). Furthermore, this sensor is equipped with an uncooled micro-
bolometric focal plane array operating in the 7.5–13 ␮m spectral
region and using a standard thermographic measuring range that
varies from −40 ◦ C to +1500 ◦ C.
3.1. Case 1: concrete building
In this case, a time-of-flight laser scanner (Trimble GX200) was
used to obtain the range images, while the thermographic cam-
era FLIR SC640 was used to obtain the thermographic images. The
workspace was focused on the main façade of a concrete building,
which can be seen in Fig. 2 right. In this case, the scan density was
high (over 2.8 millions of points with a resolution in object space
of 10 mm), producing a range image with enough texture to allow
application of the matching process. This case study was chosen due
to its simple geometry and material type of the building (concrete).
(8) The resolution of the range image (Fig. 2 left) was 1333 × 1000 pix-
els and the resolution of the thermographic image (Fig. 2 middle)
was 640 × 480 pixels.
Once the input data were obtained, several pre-processing steps
were applied automatically. In an attempt to guarantee good results
from the matching process, the range image was improved based on
a resampling that applied a distance-weighted interpolator to areas
of 3 × 3 neighbouring pixels. Next, a feature extraction of inter-
est points was performed using the Harris operator. A total of 389
440 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443

Fig. 2. From left to right: range image from the TLS point cloud, thermographic image, and visible image, of building in case study 1.

Fig. 3. Interest points extracted in the range image after applying Harris operator (case 1).

points were extracted considering a threshold of 30 and a stan-
dard deviation of the Gaussian mask of 2. Based on these features,
a multistage matching process was applied through a hierarchical
approach with the following input parameters: cross-correlation
factor of 0.7 and search kernel size of 8 pixels. Then, the epipolar
geometry was established and a constrained matching process was
repeated. Specifically, an epipolar buffer of 10 pixels was estab-
lished as constraint. As a result, 90 points were considered in the
matching process between the range and thermographic images.
Some of these points and their location can be seen in Fig. 3.
Subsequently, a thermographic camera spatial resection sup-
ported by the Pope test was computed, considering that matching
problems (i.e., blunders) might occur in areas with occlusions, a
lack of texture or a repetitive texture. More specifically, after apply-
ing the Pope test at a 95% Tau distribution significance level, only
15 points were considered to obtain an automatic co-registration
between both sensors.
Finally, after both sensors were co-registered successfully,
the following thermographic hybrid products were generated
automatically: a thermographic 3D model and its correspond-
ing orthothermogram (Fig. 4 left and right, correspondingly). The
resulting thermographic 3D models and orthothermograms can
be seen as hybrid products, bringing together the thermal and
energy performance information of thermographies with the met-
ric information of laser models. In fact, the orthothermogram can
be exploited as a matrix where the row and column pixel coordi-
nates are related to the planimetric position of the sensed detail,
with the value representing the pixel temperature.
A technical explanation concerning the generation process of
the thermographic 3D model and its corresponding orthothermo-
gram can be found in [9].
3.2. Case 2: glass and wood building
The input data for this case were comprised of a range image
(1333 × 1000 pixels) that was obtained from a laser scanner point
cloud and a camera image (640 × 480 pixels) (Fig. 5 left and right,
correspondingly). A point cloud of 1.4 million points was acquired
with a TLS Faro Photon 80, while the thermographic image (Fig. 5
middle) was taken with the thermographic camera FLIR SC640. This
case study was chosen due to its unfavourable geometry, which
presents different levels of depth, and its material type.
Next, the multi-sensor image matching was performed follow-
ing a two-fold approach. Initially, the feature extraction of interest
points was performed using the Harris operator. A total of 361
points were extracted considering a threshold of 5 and a standard
deviation of the Gaussian mask of 2; Fig. 6 shows some of these
points. Using these features, a robust and constrained matching
process was subsequently applied through a hierarchical approach
with the following input parameters: cross-correlation factor of 0.7

Fig. 4. (Left) Image of the thermographic 3D model (3D model with thermographic texture) and corresponding orthothermogram (right) resulting of the proposed method-
ology applied in the building case 1.
 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443 441

Fig. 5. From left to right: range image from the TLS point cloud, thermographic image, and visible image, of building in case study 2.

Fig. 7. Image of the thermographic 3D model (left) and corresponding orthother-

mogram (right) obtained in building case 2.

Comparisons of heat losses was made taking into consideration

Fig. 6. Interest points extracted in the range image with Harris operator (case 2).
and search kernel size of 7 pixels. Due to the different intrinsic char-
acteristics of both images, several geometric constraints supported
by epipolar geometry were considered. As a result, 90 points were
considered in the matching process between the range and camera
images, which were reduced to 29 after applying a spatial resection
for the thermographic camera supported by the Pope test at a 95%
significance level.
Finally, after the successful co-registration of both sensors a
thermographic 3D model and its corresponding orthothermogram
were obtained (Fig. 7).
3.3. Thermal analysis
Based on the generated orthothermograms, a series of isotherms
3 ◦ C wide were generated, allowing the façades to be represented
through temperature ranges, as in Fig. 8. The area of surfaces with
different temperatures can be quantified from the number of pixels
for each isotherm and the GSD (Ground Sample Distance) of the
orthothermogram.
first the average temperature of isotherms with their correspond-
ing surfaces, and second the average temperature of the whole
surface of the two isotherms, in order to quantify the significance of
the consideration of isotherms separately. The heat loss computa-
tion was carried out using the dimensional analysis approximation
and the equation of heat flow (Eq. (9)). The Nusselt number was esti-
mated considering natural convection and laminar flow through
the approximation proposed by DeWitt [31] or vertical walls and
Rayleigh values < 109 .

Q = (Ui , Ai )(1 − b)(Text − Tint ) (9)
i
where Q (W) is the total transmission heat loss, Ui (W/m2 K) is the
transmission coefficient of the surface I, Ai (m2 ) is the transmission
of the surface I and b is the temperature factor of the office con-
struction elements. Text : exterior temperature [◦ C]; Tint : interior
temperature [◦ C]. The temperature factor, b, takes into consider-
ation that the temperature of the external surface of a building
construction element can be different from the external temper-
ature. The temperature factor is consequently 0 for construction
elements facing the outdoor air [32].
Results of this analysis are shown in Table 2. In the first case,
a difference close to 25% was obtained between the computation
of heat losses on the base of the surface of isotherms and the

Table 2
Results obtained in the calculation of energy loss in the 2 buildings studied; rows 2 and 3 (case 1), and 5, 6 (case 2) show results considering only the surfaces corresponding
to each isotherm; rows 4 and 7 show the results obtained using the whole surface values.

A (m2 ) Average Heat transmission Transmission

temperature (K) coefficient (W/m2 K) heat losses

Case Isotherm 3 71.5468 294.15 1.779 381.940

1 Isotherm 4 17.9684 292.15 1.356 1.947
Whole surface 89.5152 293.15 1.953 288.172

Case Isotherm 2 41.6196 296.65 2.068 473.306

2 Isotherm 3 44.7070 293.65 1.701 144.901
Whole surface 86.3266 295.15 1.911 659.813
442 D. González-Aguilera et al. / Energy and Buildings 54 (2012) 436–443
Fig. 8. Orthothermograms with isotherms of 3 ◦ C wide, used for energy loss calculation.
computation of the whole surface. For the second building the dif-
ference was close to 7%.
4. Concluding remarks
Three dimensional laser models and 2D-thermographic images
provide complementary properties that can be exploited using a
co-registration of both sensors. In this paper, we propose an auto-
matic multi-sensor image registration method that provides the
generation of hybrid products of special interest, including thermo-
graphic 3D models and orthophotos. In this work, a multi-sensor
image pre-processing step was initially applied using range and
thermographic images as input data. Subsequently, a specific fea-
ture extraction strategy was utilised together with a multi-sensor
image-matching step. Finally, the multi-sensor image registration
was computed based on a robust thermographic camera spatial
resection that was supported by the Pope test. The performance
of the proposed multi-image registration approach was validated
using several case studies and different TLS datasets. Experimental
results presented here show that the proposed automatic multi-
sensor image registration algorithms successfully fulfilled the goals
of this research. Therefore, this work contributes to the inves-
tigation and exploitation of the metric information inherent in
range images together with the thermal information obtained from
thermographic images. This last aspect is quite important when a
thermographic camera is not treated as a stand-alone sensor, pro-
viding an informative layer that should be fused with TLS data to
build up thermographic 3D models and orthothermograms. These
orthothermograms can be used for heat loses evaluation, consid-
ering not punctual measurements of the temperature of façade
materials, but isotherms surfaces. Results show that the thermal
evaluation can be significantly improved when the real geometry
is considered.
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