Recently, many people have become aware of use of Thermal Camera in measuring human body temperature, thanks for mass media reports about fever screening for COVID19 symptoms. Most probably, this will be one of the widely used application for thermal camera in coming days, here is few areas where thermal camera has been used extensively PRE-COVID19 days
Temperature Measurement
Monitoring temperature is a requirement in many processes in many industries. While more traditional ways of temperature measurement like RTDs, ThermoCouples or pyrometers are widely used, Thermal Camera is also gaining acceptance in the industries for temperature monitoring. One immediate advantage of thermal camera over either RTD or Pyrometer is coverage of wider area. Pyrometer can measure spot temperature while a Thermal Camera can measure whole area covered by its lens.
Thermal Cameras which are used to measure temperature are also known as radiometric cameras.
Night Vision
Most probably, thermal camera is the best night vision camera and is widely used in surveillance and in other defense and security applications. This type of application does not require to measure temperature and it just uses temperature sensors to make a visible image. While there are other technologies which may provide night visibility capabilities to human eye, but thermal camera has few advantages over them. The most important is, its passivity, ie it does not require to illuminate objects to make image out of them, it makes image out of their heat radiation.
This type of cameras, which produce just images, but does not measure temperature or measures temperatures from very small area in its image ( widely known as ROI – Region of Interest) is known as non-radiometric thermal imagers.
Most thermal cameras which are used for night vision applications are generally paired with a normal camera too. With normal camera, higher resolution image and video is possible which in turn can be used for object detection and tracking.
While thermal camera provides either the temperature measurement or thermal image, it is the software application which uses these data solves a problem and performs a specific task. So, the Thermal Imaging Software that comes with the camera could be very important. Like any camera, thermal cameras can also be recorded 24 hours a day and then played back later. Apart from that, the Thermal Imaging Software could also be able to many other tasks with temperature data, like raising an alarm if it crosses a threshold.
So, it is always a good idea to check software capabilities as well as the thermal camera features while purchasing thermal camera.
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