Pure thermal would have been quite smudged. IMHO the B&W adds really nice context - and it sounds like it's not just a straight overlay, but he's recoloring the B&W pixels, which I think provides a crisper result.

I'm curious what resolutions you've worked with, if you don't mind sharing. High frame rate thermal cameras (above 9hz) are ITAR restricted. Hi-res above 640x480 is not common on the consumer market and is restricted to embargoed countries. Cooled thermal cameras are restricted too IIRC.

ITAR restricts the export of arms technology from the United States, but the big names in traditional digital cameras are all Japanese. Perhaps naively, I would have thought they'd have the expertise needed to build a high-quality thermal camera without US involvement. I suppose infrared imaging must be quite a bit different from visible light.

The device we had was 1.3MP--rough the same resolution as the composite image discussed in this article. The camera core was expensive, but the lens actually cost more than the sensor. Yes it was ITAR regulated.

As an example of what I would have expected, this product brief (not the device we were using, but similar) has a picture of the white house https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/m...

Thanks. Interesting link. I must admit I can’t help but admire Lockheed’s marketing with that whitehouse image. There’s a not-so-subtle message in there.

Sounds like super interesting work!!

That's the Capitol building though, not the White House?

probably - I have never actually been to DC

The company is Santa Barbara Focalplane.

They're right around the corner from FLIR and Seek Thermal is right down the street.

Lots of amazing tech in this little town.

I presume that was with 16 bits per pixel, which is not available in consumer cameras.

(That building is the U.S. Capitol rather than the White House.)

At my previous work I was involved with processing of data from 1024x800 cameras with 16 bit per pixel and nice optics. After proper calibration and trivial image processing they were not particularly blurry since they were able to resolve even tiny temperature differences.

By that metric, most of the NASA images you see are "drawings" as well. I worked on imaging systems for various NASA spacecraft, and most of the published images are false-color, albedo-adjusted, averaged mosaics of many imaging sources from different orbital passes over months or years. Images of people and everyday things are heavily-processed as well, using techniques like HDR and color correction. Photography has always involved this sort of technical manipulation.

> By that metric, most of the NASA images you see are "drawings" as well.

Yes, there is no debate about that.

Even biological vision involves some processing from raw light → mental perception.

OP here -- I added a top-level comment with some more links. In particular you can find the separate thermal and visible images on the repo: https://github.com/dheera/iceland-thermal

Thanks for the clarification! This makes sense, the reason your images look 'off' is that the normal thermal pallets (such as the one in your colorbar) are typically a roughly constant (or at least smoothly varying) luminance with the thermal information stored in the chroma. Your images have that multiplied by the visible light image intensity which gives a very surreal effect. Fun stuff

Don't commercial thermal imaging cameras also do a thermal/visible composite? Would those also not count as thermal images?