Deep Fusion of Ultra-Low-Resolution Thermal Camera and Gyroscope Data for Lighting-Robust and Compute-Efficient Rotational Odometry

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mohsen, Farida, Safa, Ali
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mohsen, Farida
Safa, Ali
author_facet Mohsen, Farida
Safa, Ali
contents Accurate rotational odometry is crucial for autonomous robotic systems, particularly for small, power-constrained platforms such as drones and mobile robots. This study introduces thermal-gyro fusion, a novel sensor fusion approach that integrates ultra-low-resolution thermal imaging with gyroscope readings for rotational odometry. Unlike RGB cameras, thermal imaging is invariant to lighting conditions and, when fused with gyroscopic data, mitigates drift which is a common limitation of inertial sensors. We first develop a multimodal data acquisition system to collect synchronized thermal and gyroscope data, along with rotational speed labels, across diverse environments. Subsequently, we design and train a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that fuses both modalities for rotational speed estimation. Our analysis demonstrates that thermal-gyro fusion enables a significant reduction in thermal camera resolution without significantly compromising accuracy, thereby improving computational efficiency and memory utilization. These advantages make our approach well-suited for real-time deployment in resource-constrained robotic systems. Finally, to facilitate further research, we publicly release our dataset as supplementary material.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Fusion of Ultra-Low-Resolution Thermal Camera and Gyroscope Data for Lighting-Robust and Compute-Efficient Rotational Odometry
Mohsen, Farida
Safa, Ali
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate rotational odometry is crucial for autonomous robotic systems, particularly for small, power-constrained platforms such as drones and mobile robots. This study introduces thermal-gyro fusion, a novel sensor fusion approach that integrates ultra-low-resolution thermal imaging with gyroscope readings for rotational odometry. Unlike RGB cameras, thermal imaging is invariant to lighting conditions and, when fused with gyroscopic data, mitigates drift which is a common limitation of inertial sensors. We first develop a multimodal data acquisition system to collect synchronized thermal and gyroscope data, along with rotational speed labels, across diverse environments. Subsequently, we design and train a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that fuses both modalities for rotational speed estimation. Our analysis demonstrates that thermal-gyro fusion enables a significant reduction in thermal camera resolution without significantly compromising accuracy, thereby improving computational efficiency and memory utilization. These advantages make our approach well-suited for real-time deployment in resource-constrained robotic systems. Finally, to facilitate further research, we publicly release our dataset as supplementary material.
title Deep Fusion of Ultra-Low-Resolution Thermal Camera and Gyroscope Data for Lighting-Robust and Compute-Efficient Rotational Odometry
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12536