Aerial thermography for energy efficiency of buildings: the ChoT project

Abstract

The ChoT project aims at analysing the potential of aerial thermal imagery to produce large scale datasets for energetic efficiency analyses and policies in urban environments. It is funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) in the framework of the SIR 2014 (Scientific Independence of young Researchers) programme. The city of Bologna (Italy) was chosen as the case study. The acquisition of thermal infrared images at different times by multiple aerial flights is one of the main tasks of the project. The present paper provides an overview of the ChoT project, but it delves into some specific aspects of the data processing chain: the computing of the radiometric quantities of the atmosphere, the estimation of surface emissivity (through an object-oriented classification applied on a very high resolution multispectral image, to distinguish among the major roofing materials) and sky-view factor (by means of a digital surface model). To collect ground truth data, the surface temperature of roofs and road pavings was measured at several locations at the same time as the aircraft acquired the thermal images. Furthermore, the emissivity of some roofing materials was estimated by means of a thermal camera and a contact probe. All the surveys were georeferenced by GPS. The results of the first surveying campaign demonstrate the high sensitivity of the model to the variability of the surface emissivity and the atmospheric parameters.

A Critical Review of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Use in Architecture and Urbanism: Scientometric and Bibliometric Analysis

“…The project was entitled "the Challenge of remote sensing Thermography as indicator of energy efficiency of buildings" (ChoT). It was funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) in the framework of the SIR 2014 (Scientific Independence of young Researchers) programme [121].…”

“…For further reading comprehension, Table 6 summarises the main applications and payloads identified by cluster. Urban thermal monitoring [111][112][113][114][115][116][117]121] Urban energy system inspection [110] Air quality control [122][123][124] Smart city [6,50,[125][126][127] Cadastral mapping [92]…”

Super-Resolution of Thermal Images Using an Automatic Total Variation Based Method

“…The first test image was constituted by an aerial thermal image (size 480 × 640 pixels), representing the School of Engineering of Bologna University. It was part of the thermal aerial survey over the city of Bologna, held on 14 March 2016 in the framework of the ChoT (The challenge of remote sensing thermography as indicator of energy efficiency of buildings) project [32]. Only the most relevant characteristics of the survey are summarized here, and readers are referred to previous publications for further details [15,33].…”

“…Now, we analyze the performance of the ASR2 for MISR, that is more than one input image was available (we name our method as ASR2_m in the following). Figure 4a plots the increasing trends of the PSNR parameter of ASR2_m by increasing the number of input images in the range [2,32]. We observed that about 12 images were sufficient to get the best result.…”

Integrated Use of Remote Sensed Data and Numerical Cartography for the Generation of 3d City Models

“…This district, located North in Bologna, has been chosen because it is the subject of energetic efficiency analysis in the frame of the ChoT project (The Challenge of remote sensing Thermography as indicator of energy efficiency of buildings) of the DICAM Dept. (Mandanici & Conte, 2016). The generated buildings' 3D model may in fact constitute another important factor in the evaluation of energy efficiency in this urban area.…”