In photographic technique, "blur" is very important. First of all because it is an excellent compositional tool: it isolates the subject and eliminates confusing elements in the frame. The expedient most commonly used is blurred background for highlighting more the object portrayed. The subject in focus, standing out on a blurred background, captures attention; draws the observer's gaze "inside" of the photograph. On the other hand, the mechanism that causes thermal images to lose texture and become blurry, called ‘ghosting’, is unique to infrared thermal imaging and, therefore, fascinating. As the authors affirm, it does not occur in visible-light optical imaging. The authors developed a thermal simulator specifically for 3D real-world scenes with non-uniform temperature distribution, showing that thermal physics-driven perception algorithms can correctly recover the geometric textures of realistic scenes with non-uniform temperatures. Thanks to extensive numerical simulations, the authors shed light on the thermal physics-driven definition of texture, demonstrating the role of the number of spectral bands in recovering the ground truth of complex scenes using a thermal simulator, and establishing the error in estimating the scene in relation to the number of spectral bands. Technically speaking, the authors’ work clearly shows that image processing fails to recover geometric textures when the direct emission is spatially non-uniform, that is the fundamental reason causing the persistence of the ghosting effect in thermal imaging in spite of significant advances in camera hardware.

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