PANTIR - a dual camera setup for precise georeferencing and mosaicing of thermal aerial images

Research and monitoring in fields like hydrology and agriculture are applications of airborne thermal infrared (TIR) cameras, which suffer from low spatial resolution and low quality lenses. Common ground control points (GCPs), lacking thermal activity and being relatively small in size, cannot be used in TIR images. Precise georeferencing and mosaicing however is necessary for data analysis. Adding a high resolution visible light camera (VIS) with a high quality lens very close to the TIR camera, in the same stabilized rig, allows us to do accurate geoprocessing with standard GCPs after fusing both images (VIS+TIR) using standard image registration methods.