Real-time compression of high-bandwidth measurement data of thermographic cameras with high temporal and spatial resolution

Abstract

The high temporal and spatial resolution of industrial thermographic cameras creates a rapid growth in the bandwidth of measurement data, such that the bandwidth of widely used standard data transmission links is becoming a performance bottleneck for thermographic systems. This paper proposes the use of real-time compression for the measurement data in future high-performance thermographic cameras. Real-time compression of high-throughput input stream is achieved via a lightweight and low-latency algorithm based on predictive coding. To obtain a high compression ratio while ensuring the quality of compressed data, the compression core exploits image-dependent measurement information such as calibration range and controls the compression quality correspondingly. Experimental results show that the proposed camera integrated thermographic data compression reduces the average required bandwidth by over 85%.