Thermoxels

A voxel-based method to generate simulation-ready 3D thermal models

INFORMATION

Authors: Etienne Chassaing, Florent Forest, Olga Fink, Malcolm Mielle

Published in: Journal of Physics: Conference Series (CISBAT 2025)

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With Thermoxels, the question we asked is: “Is it possible to create a 3D reconstruction that is directly compatible with finite-element-analysis (FEA) software?” if you have worked with FEA, you know that creating the mesh for such a purpose is very difficult. They are constraints in:

• The elements you use in the representation and their interfaces.
• The size and position of those elements.

Thermoxels solves those problems by creating a voxel-based representation compatible with FEA, including both geometry and temperature, from a sparse set of RGB and thermal images.

Method

Thermoxels is a novel voxel-based method able to generate FEA-compatible models, including both geometry and temperature, from a sparse set of RGB and thermal images.

Using pairs of RGB and thermal images as input, Thermoxels represents a scene’s geometry as a set of voxels comprising color and temperature information. After optimization, a simple process is used to transform Thermoxels’ models into tetrahedral meshes compatible with FEA.

Results

We conduct a simple heat conduction simulation using FEA, achieving convergence from an initial state defined by Thermoxels’ thermal reconstruction.