Infrared Image Series Automatic Registration and a History & Tendency Analysis

Infrared camera has been widely used in electrical power systems for predictive and preventive thermal fault diagnosis. Without historical IR images being considered, most thermograph analysis used at present are concerned with static image. The dynamic history and tendency analysis which compares the newly taken image with historical images is particularly attractive. Conclusions can be drawn from temperature variations rather than just from anomalous thermal pattern. However the spatial distortions prevent such dynamic analysis from being practicable. So the need to register infrared images arises. This paper proposes an automatic registration algorithm based on closed temperature contour matching for infrared image series of a target equipment taken at different times. Centroid Distance Function is used in image registration for the first time. The algorithm can remove spatial distortions, bring temperature variations into prominence and endow infrared camera with dynamic analysis ability. Experiment shows that the algorithm is simple, effective and extensible.