The Practice of Detecting Termites with Infrared Thermal Imaging Compared to Conventional Techniques

Adequate IR camera resolution is a combination of the IR camera detector and optics. The wise thermographer ensures the right system is available for the job at hand. This paper illustrates with real world measurements on actual thermal anomalies found in the field, the magnitude of error one can expect with 3 different resolution IR cameras using their standard optics. All measurements were made at about the same time from the same distance on the same targets under the same environmental and load conditions using different models (shown in parentheses below) of FLIR Systems cameras. For brevity, we will call them low, medium and high resolution IR cameras. The low resolution camera has 160 horizontal by 120 vertical pixels (E65), the medium resolution camera 320 horizontal by 240 pixels (P65HS) and the high resolution camera 640 by 480 pixels (P640) in their respective detector arrays. Also for brevity, we use "resolution" for "spatial resolution" in this paper.