Thermal Imaging for Interactive Surfaces

Thermal camera operating in Far Infrared (FIR) is considered to be underexplored in fields other than security and law enforcement. Nevertheless, recently it drawn the attention of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers as a new sensory system enabling novel interactive systems. They are robust to illumination changes and using it with well-known computer vision techniques, the complexity of the interaction detection is highly reduced as compared to RGB and depth cameras. FIR radiation, however, has another undiscovered characteristic that distinguishes thermal cameras from their RGB or depth counterparts, namely thermal reflection. Commonly, surfaces reflect thermal radiation differently than visual light and can become a perfect thermal mirror. In this thesis, we show that through thermal reflection, thermal cameras can sense the space beyond their direct field of view (areas besides and even behind the camera’ field of view). We investigate how thermal reflection can potentially increase the interaction space of projected surfaces using camera-projection systems. We moreover discuss the reflection characteristics of common surfaces in our vicinity in both the visual and thermal radiation bands. Using a proof-of-concept prototype, we demonstrate the increased interaction space for hand-held camera-projection system. Furthermore, we depict a number of other promising application examples that can largely benefit from the thermal reflection characteristic of surfaces.