Investigating the Quality of UAV-Based Images for the Thermographic Analysis of Buildings

Abstract

Thermography for building audits is commonly carried out by means of terrestrial recording processes with static cameras. The implementation of drones to automatically acquire images from various perspectives can speed up and facilitate the procedure but requires higher recording distances, utilizes changing recording angles and has to contend with the effects of movement during image capture. This study investigates the influence of different drone settings on the quality of thermographic images for building audits in comparison to ground-based acquisition. To this end, several buildings are photographically captured via unmanned aerial vehicle and classical terrestrial means to generate a dataset of 968 images in total. These are analyzed and compared according to five quality criteria that are explicitly chosen for this study to establish best-practice rules for thermal image acquisition. We discover that flight speeds of up to 5 m/s have no visible effects on the image quality. The combination of smaller distances (22 m above a building) and a 45° camera angle are found to allow for both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of rooftops as well as a qualitative screening of building façades. Greater distances of 42 m between camera and building may expedite the acquisition procedure for larger-scaled district coverage but cannot be relied upon for thermal analyses beyond qualitative studies.