<title>Developmental thermography: panoramic thermography</title>

Abstract

Panoramic thermography (PT), a kind of developmental thermography (DT), is a unique thermographic imaging technique, which enables us to capture a continuous thermogram even over the entire surface of a subject. This paper presents the method of PT and discusses the special advantages of this technique. The advantages specific to PT are as follows: (1) Continuous temperature distribution can be captured. (2) The coverage of the panoramic thermogram is variable even over the entire surface of a subject. (3) Image enlargement along the developmental axis is possible. (4) Pattern resolution in PT increases with the enlargement of the panoramic thermogram. (5) Continuous scanning along the center axis in PT lead to high fidelity of the thermogram over the whole coverage. PT is expected to lead an epoch- making thermographic imaging technique.