When we re-entered South Korea I saw guard looking with an infrared camera at all arriving people. It was very hot outside so the heads were very red. My assumption is that this is used to spot people who have fever – however I could not verify this.
Looking at the images created while people moved around I realized that for many tasks in activity recognition, home health care, and wellness this may be an interesting technology to use. For several tasks in context-awareness it seems straightforward to get this information from an infrared camera. In the computer vision domain it seems that there have several papers towards this problem over the recent years.
We could thing of an interesting project topic related to infrared activity recognition or interaction to be integrated in our new lab… There are probably some fairly cheep thermo-sensing cameras around to used in research – for home brew use you find hints on the internet, e.g. How to turn a digital camera into an IR cam – pretty similar to what we did with the web cams for our multi-touch table.
The photo is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermography
Without doing any research on the thermal sensitive camera at the border I would consider also the purpose of identifying hidden stuff. if something is hidden on the body it would show up with a different thermal signature.