Improvements to reliability and speed being rolled out

We have been working on improvements to the speed and reliability of the Te Kahu Ora thermal cameras. Of the over 500 videos we collected from our cameras in the field we found that 10% of the time we were not reading a temperature when a person was standing in front of the camera (90% reliable). The average time to read was 4.6s.

Time to measure temperature before changes

Interestingly the reliability varied quite a bit from camera to camera. The best camera had a 94.3% reliability and was set up pointing at a thermally neutral wall with no hot objects (such as lights) in the field of view.  The worst camera had a 87% reliability and had fluorescent lights in the field of view. The lesson here is that if you can significantly improve the reliability if you can position your camera so it has a thermally neutral background.

We have been investigating improvements to the algorithm and found with some fairly simple changes we were able to reduce the missed reads to 3.7% and the average time to read to 2.6s.

Time to measure temperature after changes

Although we can still improve from here we thought we should make these improvements available to our customers. As such we expect to push out the changes to our beta customers shortly and expect to make this available to all customers sometime next week, all going well.. If you would like to test this early you can read the instructions to change to the beta software on your Teka Ora camera here.

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