This article explains how to manually extract thermal data from the Radiometric JPEGs. Some platforms have trouble processing the embedded data, so this guide shows how to pull the thermal data manually when needed.
When setting up the automated flight, be sure to select the Infrared (IR) lens sensor.
When you switch to the IR sensor on the Raptor T, the file type should automatically switch to Radiometric JPEG (JPG).
Double check the selected photo formats that are being saved.
Execute the flight using the built in automated flight functionality or a supported third-party app. You can verify the thermal type was captured by the "_T.JPG" suffix of the image filename.
While these are not endorsements, and various bits of software have been used to validate this, the below are the most simple and straightforward for validation.
You can use a software that scrapes the JPG metadata to pull out the thermal band into a separate TIFF file, like the tool found here:
The resulting TIFF files will look like this:
Advanced note: In some cases, you may want to carry the image metadata from the original photo over to the TIFF file. Using Exiftool, you can use the command below to copy the metadata from the original photos:
exiftool -overwrite_original -tagsfromfile "PICFOLDER/%f.JPG" -all:all "TIFFFOLDER"
You can then use software like ImageJ to read the raw thermal data. You'll see the thermal values are available in the TIFF file. For example, "value" at the top of the screenshot is the temperature value of that pixel:
Once the thermal band is extracted from the radiometric JPG files, you can process or convert the data as needed.
Here's an example of the TIFF files stitched into an orthomosaic using WebODM:
Here is an exported GeoTIFF viewed in QGIS:
