In this work we propose long wave infrared (LWIR) imagery as a viable supporting modality for semantic segmentation using learning-based techniques. We first address the problem of RGB-thermal camera calibration by proposing a passive calibration target and procedure that is both portable and easy to use. Second, we present PST900, a dataset of 894 synchronized and calibrated RGB and Thermal image pairs with per pixel human annotations across four distinct classes from the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Lastly, we propose a CNN architecture for fast semantic segmentation that combines both RGB and Thermal imagery in a way that leverages RGB imagery independently. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art and show that our method outperforms them in our dataset.
@article{arxiv.1909.10980,
title = {PST900: RGB-Thermal Calibration, Dataset and Segmentation Network},
author = {Shreyas S. Shivakumar and Neil Rodrigues and Alex Zhou and Ian D. Miller and Vijay Kumar and Camillo J. Taylor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.10980},
year = {2019}
}