Infrared (IR) thermal cameras can be used in a number of different situations, for example, when inspecting or surveying complex electrical systems such as transformers, switchgears, etc., or water carrying systems such as heat exchangers, radiators, etc. IR cameras are used for capturing, displaying and storing thermal images. The thermal images may then be viewed and analyzed in order to, for example, find faulty electrical wirings or couplings, leaking water pipes, etc.
When viewing a thermal image captured by an IR camera in an IR camera display, there are a number of different view parameters that determines how the thermal image is presented to the user of the IR camera. For example, there may be a thermal image colour span, which the user may set in order to determine in between which temperature values the colour map of the presented thermal image should range. A further example is a thermal image colour level, which the user may set in order to determine around which temperature the colours should be centred.
Different settings of these view parameters in an IR camera may be used in situations, such as, for example, when trying to perform scene comparisons that have the same colour-to-temperature scaling, or in order to identify and show temperature gradients in thermal images with large temperature differences where the interesting temperature gradients is within a small portion of the entire thermal image.
These view parameters require default settings or that manual settings are inputted into the IR camera in order to present a thermal image that can be readily interpreted by the user. However, this requires that the user of the IR camera be experienced and understands exactly how to adjust the view parameters in order to get the information he needs. For an inexperienced user, the manual inputs may be difficult to understand and inefficient to use.
Furthermore, it may also be difficult for an inexperienced user to know how to adjust the settings of the view parameters in order to see other objects, particularly, if the IR camera is in a fusion mode where the temperatures that are bottomed (flattened) are replaced with a visual image, that is, the pixels having a temperature that are outside the thermal image colours span being replaced with visual image pixels. It may also be difficult to adjust the view parameter settings and interpret what you actually see when, for example, sweeping with the IR camera over an area with different temperature content looking for small temperature gradients at different temperature levels.
Automatic settings based on the entire thermal image content or a majority of the entire thermal image content is known. These automatic settings may work well in some situations, but work less well in others, such as, for example, when viewing an image view with large temperature differences or when the user is only interested in a specific portion of the thermal image.