A Hand-Held Sensor System for Exploration and Thermal Mapping of Volcanic Fumarole Fields

Abstract

Research from the field of planetary- and geoscience require investigation of geological features in harsh environments. Sampled data needs to be precisely localized spatially and in time, and to be prepared appropriately for further inspection and evaluation. In the case of thermal image data, the computer vision community has made enormous progress in the past years to combine thermal with spatial information in form of thermal 3D models. In this paper, we propose to use a camerabased hand-held sensor system to capture and georeference thermal images in rugged terrain and to prepare the data for further investigations by visualizing the thermal data in 3D. We use a global localization solution to gain fast 3D impressions of the environment and further Structure from Motion to generate detailed mid-scale models of selected interesting structures. We demonstrate our application based on a challenging dataset that we acquired in the active fumarole fields of Vulcano, Siciliy.