Burka foils thermal imager

Over the past few years, thermal imaging cameras have been used to locate people by capturing images of the heat emitted by their bodies.

That's because, of course, that when viewed through a thermal imaging camera, warm objects stand out well against cooler backgrounds, hence humans become easily visible against the environment.

Now, due to the miniaturization of electronic and electro-mechanical components, such infra-red cameras can be easily mounted onto inexpensive small unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used by the police forces to assist with public safety missions.

Although relatively few of such drones are currently flown over US soil, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that 30,000 drones will fill the nation's skies in less than 20 years.

However, some Members of Congress and the public fear there are insufficient safeguards in place to ensure that drones are not used to spy on American citizens and unduly infringe upon their fundamental privacy.

Proponents have responded by emphasizing their potential benefits, which may include protecting public safety, patrolling borders, and investigating and enforcing environmental and criminal law violations.

Clothes designer Adam Harvey  is one individual that falls into the former camp. It's clear that he thinks that thermal imaging systems mounted on drones are a threat to our civil liberties. And his concern with protecting the privacy of individuals has now led him to create a range of so-called 'Anti-Drone' garments designed with a fabric that apparently protects the wearer against thermal imaging surveillance.

They work by using highly metallized fibers to reflect heat, thereby masking the wearer's thermal signature. Of the three 'Anti-Drone' pieces that have been created so far, two are inspired by Muslim dress: the burqa and the scarf. A third piece -- the hoodie -- is intended to thwart overhead thermal surveillance from drones.

While I'm as concerned about protecting the privacy of the public as anyone else, I can't help but think that Mr. Harvey may not have thought his idea out quite as thoroughly as he should.

You see, while the metalized fiber burka shown above might well reduce the chances that an individual is spotted by a thermal imager mounted in a police drone, it will certainly increase the chances that the individual will be spotted by police on the ground, since he or she will stick out like a sore thumb.

Reference: Drones in Domestic Surveillance Operations: Fourth Amendment Implications and Legislative by Richard M. Thompson II.

Turn your iPhone into an IR camera

If you live an old drafty house like I do, you're probably not looking forward to another long cold winter -- not in the least because you will inevitably find yourself shelling out exorbitant sums of money just to keep the place nice and toasty.

Fortunately, since the advent of thermal imaging cameras, it's now pretty easy to identify patterns of heat loss from your property and to then take some remedial action to fix any problems.

Due to the cost of the cameras, however, it's unlikely that you will want to go out and buy one yourself. It's more likely that you will call on the services of a professional home inspector or energy auditor who will bring their own thermal imaging kit around to your properties to perform the task.

Even a professional survey, however, isn't likely to come cheap, although probably a darned sight less expensive than buying your own camera.

Faced with these two alternatives, engineer Andy Rawson decided to turn his iPhone into a thermal camera by developing custom-built hardware and software solution that would interface to it.

More specifically, Rawson designed a PCB board that sports a Melexis (Ieper, Belgium) MLX90620 FIRray device which can measure thermal radiation between -20°C to 300°C thanks to its 16 x 4 element far infrared (FIR) thermopile sensor array. The software then transmits the thermal images collected by the infrared sensor on Rawson’s board to the iPhone through its dock connector after which they are overlaid onto the phone's display together with numerical temperature values.

Having developed the hardware and the software, Rawson says that he would now like to make and sell the systems so others can save money and energy. He figures he should be able to manufacture and sell them for around $150.

Nevertheless, this is also going to be an open source hardware project, so if you want to make your own systems, that's fine by him too. A man of his words, Rawson posted the iPhone code and the board layout on the internet this week. Interested readers can find it here.

While he might be a talented engineer, Rawson admits that he is terrible at dreaming up names for his projects! So he's encouraging people to submit names for the new design to his web site. The winner will receive one of the thermal imaging systems for free.

A video of the thermal imaging system in action can be seen on YouTube here.

Taking the temperature of elephants

Many of our readers will be familiar with the principle of operation of thermal imaging (infrared) cameras and how they can be used in a variety of applications ranging from determining the thermal loss of buildings, detecting specific gases, or monitoring production processes.

But like me, most people might be surprised to hear that a group of researchers from the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) are now using such cameras to study the thermoregulation of animals such as elephants.

That's right. As a member in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science (APS), Esther Finegan and her students have filmed elephants in Busch Gardens zoological park in Florida with a thermal imaging camera to see how and when they store and radiate heat. She and her students are now pioneering similar thermoregulation studies at the Toronto Zoo.

While the use of thermal imaging will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable tool that will enable zookeepers and landscape architects to better design the animals' surroundings to keep them happy and healthy, this isn't the only means by which researchers have measured the temperature of such beasts.


Last year, for example, scientists at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology (FIWI) at the University of Veterinary Medicine (Vienna, Austria) showed that Asian elephants respond to high daytime temperatures by significantly lowering their body temperature during the cooler night hours. By doing so they create a thermal reserve that allows them to store heat and so prevent heat stress as temperatures rise during the day.

To reach that conclusion, they fed small telemeters to a group of captive elephants in Thailand and a group at the Munich Zoo Hellabrunn to monitor temperatures in the animals' gastrointestinal tract. The telemetry system, which permits the continuous recording of temperature, had previously been developed at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology.

Statistical analysis of the data confirmed that while the overall mean body temperature was similar in both the Thai and the German elephants, fluctuations in body temperature were on average twice as large in the Thai animals as in the German ones. The Thai animals had both a higher daily peak temperature and a lower minimum temperature, which the scientists related to the higher mean ambient temperatures in Thailand.

In fact, the body temperature of the Thai elephants dropped at night to well below the normal average, meaning that Thai elephants start the day with a much larger thermal reserve than their German counterparts.

It just goes to show that, just as there's more than one way to skin a cat, there is also more than one way to take the temperature of an elephant. But if I were an elephant, I'd probably prefer the noninvasive image-processing approach rather than ingesting a telemetry system.

Mugging more effective than infrared imaging

All technology can be used for both good and evil purposes. Take infrared cameras, for example. While they can be used to provide a good indication of where your house might need a little more insulation, they can also be used by crooks to capture the details of the PIN you use each time you slip your card into an ATM to withdraw cash.

That, at least, is the opinion of a band of researchers from the University of California at San Diego (San Diego, CA, USA) who have apparently now demonstrated that the secret codes typed in by banking customers on ATMs can be recorded by a digital infrared camera due to the residual heat left behind on their keypads.

According to an article on MIT’s Technology Review web site, the California academics showed that a digital infrared camera can read the digits of a customer's PIN number on the keypad more than 80% of the time if used immediately; if the camera is used a minute later, it can still detect the correct digits about half the time.

Keaton Mowery, a doctoral student in computer science at UCS, conducted the research with fellow student Sarah Meiklejohn and professor Stefan Savage.

But even Mowery had to admit that the likelihood of anyone attacking an ATM in such a manner was low, partly due to the $18,000 cost of buying such a camera or its $2000 per month rental fee. He even acknowledged that mugging would prove a lot more reliable means to extract money from the ATM user, albeit the technique isn't quite as elegant as using an imaging system to do so.

Sick bay uses high-tech imaging

While the exploitation of vision systems has made inspection tasks more automated, those systems have also reduced or eliminated the need for unskilled workers.

But such workers won't be the only ones to suffer from the onslaught of vision technology -- pretty soon even skilled folks in professions such as medicine might start to see their roles diminished by automation systems, too.

As a precursor of things to come, take a look at a new system developed by researchers at the Leicester University as a means of helping doctors to noninvasively diagnose disease.

Surrounding a conventional hospital bed, thermal, multispectral, hyperspectral, and ultrasound imagers gather information from patients. Complementing the imaging lineup is a real-time mass spectrometer that can analyze gases present in a patient's breath to detect for signs of disease.

Professor Mark Sims, the University of Leicester researcher who led the development of the system, said that its aim was to replace a doctor's eyes with imaging systems, and his nose with breath analysis systems.

Even though nearly all the technologies employed in the system have been used in one way or another, Sims said that they have never all been used in an integrated manner.

Clearly, though, if this instrumentation were coupled to advanced software that could correlate all the information captured from a patient with a database of known disease traits, one would have a pretty powerful tool through which to diagnose disease.

The doctors, of course, would then have to find something else to occupy their time. But just think of the cost savings that could be made.