Introduction

Abstract

With the greater availability and effectively falling prices of thermocameras, in the last years thermography has developed from a rarely used technique towards an increasingly popular investigation method. The technical development of thermocameras to a great extent had been triggered by military research, where night vision means are providing tactic advantages. With the end of the cold war, highly sensitive infrared (IR) technology is increasingly less restricted, now also entering the civil market. Apart from night vision applications, the dominant applications of thermography are the imaging of temperature differences in daily life (e.g., heat losses in buildings), in technique (e.g., monitoring of power stations), and in biology/medicine (e.g., skin temperature mapping). In the following we will call these applications “classical” or steady-state thermography, since here steady-state temperature contrasts are imaged. This book, however, will not deal with classical thermography, since there are a number of books on general thermography available (e.g., [1, 2]).