RGB-T image analysis technology and application: A survey

RGB-Thermal infrared (RGB-T) image analysis has been actively studied in recent years. In the past decade, it has received wide attention and made a lot of important research progress in many applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of RGB-T image analysis technology and application, including several hot fields: image fusion, salient object detection, semantic segmentation, pedestrian detection, object tracking, and person re-identification. The first two belong to the preprocessing technology for many computer vision tasks, and the rest belong to the application direction. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers spanning more than 10 different application tasks. Furthermore, for each specific task, this paper comprehensively analyzes the various methods and presents the performance of the state-of-the-art methods. This paper also makes an in-deep analysis of challenges for RGB-T image analysis as well as some potential technical improvements in the future.