Detecting Common Insulation Problems in Built Environments using Thermal Images

Abstract

Proper thermal insulation yields optimum energy expenses in buildings by maintaining necessary heat gain or loss through the built envelope. However, improper thermal insulation causes significant energy wastage along with infusing various damages on indoor and outdoor walls of the buildings, for example, damp areas, black stains, cracks, paint bubbles etc. Therefore, it is important to inspect the temperature variations in different areas of the built environments in regular basis. We propose a method for identifying temperature variance in building thermal images based on Symbolic Aggregated Approximation (SAX). Our process helps detect the temperature variation over different image segments and infers the fault prone segments of leakages. We have collected about 50 thermal images associated with different types of wall specific insulation problems in indoor built environment and were able to identify the affected area with approximately 75% accuracy using our proposed method based on temperature variation detection approach.