Throughout much of machine vision's early years the infrared imagery has suffered from return on investment despite its advantages over visual counterparts. Recently, the ?scal momentum has switched in favor of both manufacturers and practitioners of infrared technology as a result of today's rising security and safety challenges and advances in thermographic sensors and their continuous drop in costs. This yielded a great impetus in achieving ever better performance in remote surveillance, object recognition, guidance, noncontact medical measurements, and more. The purpose of this book is to...

Human visual perception is limited to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not. Cameras sensitive to the different infrared spectra can enhance the abilities of autonomous systems and visually perceive the environment in a holistic way. Relevant scene content can be made visible especially in situations, where sensors of other modalities face issues like a visual-optical camera that needs a source of illumination. As a consequence, not only human mistakes can be avoided by increasing the level of automation, but also machine-induced errors can be reduced that, for example, could...