Physically Based Simulation and Rendering of Urban Thermography

Urban thermography is a non-invasive measurement technique commonly used for building diagnosis and energy efficiency evaluation. The physical interpretation of thermal images is a challenging task because they do not necessarily depict the real temperature of the surfaces, but one estimated from the measured incoming radiation. In this sense, the computational rendering of a thermal image can be useful to understand the results captured in a measurement campaign. The computer graphics community has proposed techniques for light rendering that are used for its thermal counterpart. In this work, a physically based simulation methodology based on a combination of the finite element method (FEM) and ray tracing is presented. The proposed methods were tested using a highly detailed urban geometry. Directional emissivity models, glossy reflectivity functions and importance sampling were used to render thermal images. The simulation results were compared with a set of measured thermograms, showing good agreement between them.