A demo of the Infrared Street View

An infrared street view

The award-winning Infrared Street View program is an ambitious project that aims to create something similar to Google's Street View, but in infrared light. The ultimate goal is to develop the world's first thermographic information system (TIS) that allows the positioning of thermal elements and the tracking of thermal processes on a massive scale. The applications include building energy efficiency, real estate inspection, and public security monitoring, to name a few.

An infrared image sphere

The Infrared Street View project is based on infrared cameras that work with now ubiquitous smartphones. It takes advantages of the orientation and location sensors of smartphones to store information necessary to knit an array of infrared thermal images taken at different angles and positions into a 3D image that, when rendered on a dome, creates an illusion of immersive 3D effects for the viewer.

The project was launched in 2016 and later joined by three brilliant computer science undergraduate students, Seth Kahn, Feiyu Lu, and Gabriel Terrell, from Tufts University, who developed a primitive system consisting of 1) an iOS frontend app to collect infrared image spheres, 2) a backend cloud app to process the images, and 3) a Web interface for users to view the stitched infrared images anchored at selected locations on a Google Maps application.

The following YouTube video demonstrates an early concept played out on an iPhone: