Drive-By Heat Mapping
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—An MIT spin-off company is bringing technology similar to the cars Google used for its “Street View” to energy-efficiency monitoring. Essess deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that can create heat maps of thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in building envelopes to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, the mompany’s rooftop-mounted device includes several long-wave infrared radiometric cameras and near-infrared cameras that capture heat signatures, while a LiDAR system captures 3-D images to discern building facades. Computer vision and machine-learning algorithms stitch together the images, extract features, and filter out background objects. In one night, the cars can generate more than 3 terabytes of data, which is downloaded and processed at the startup’s Boston headquarters. Combining the heat maps with analytics, Essess shows utilities companies which households leak the most energy, so the utilities know where to direct energy-efficiency spending. Founded in 2011, the startup has mapped more than 4 million homes and buildings across the United States for military, commercial, and research purposes.
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