ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bansal, Shruti, Wang, Wenshan, Liu, Yifei, Maheshwari, Parv
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bansal, Shruti
Wang, Wenshan
Liu, Yifei
Maheshwari, Parv
author_facet Bansal, Shruti
Wang, Wenshan
Liu, Yifei
Maheshwari, Parv
contents Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20969
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation
Bansal, Shruti
Wang, Wenshan
Liu, Yifei
Maheshwari, Parv
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.
title ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20969