Thermal Object Detection AI

Detect people, vehicles, animals, and hot spots in thermal video, in total darkness, smoke, glare, and dust.

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AI-detected thermal image showing a person, a pickup truck with an open hood, and a hot spot on an electrical box.

Thermal Object Detection AI for the Toughest Perimeters, Plants, and Night Shifts

  • Deploy Anywhere, Run Everywhere

    Run thermal object detection on fixed, drone, and vehicle-mounted thermal cameras on the edge, on-prem, in your VPC, or via API.

  • One Platform, Full Adoption

    Tools every security, safety, and maintenance team can adopt, from site security leads to reliability engineers and drone pilots, no separate ML team required.

  • Secure, Compliant, and Audit-Ready

    Data stays safe with SOC 2 Type II compliance, encrypted data, HIPAA compliance, and an uptime SLA.

  • People & Vehicle Detection in Total Darkness
  • Detection Through Smoke, Glare & Dust
  • Hot Spots on Equipment & Electrical Gear
  • Wildlife & Animal Detection at Night
  • Thermal Drone Inspection
  • Thermal + RGB Camera Pairing

Talk to a Vision AI engineer who's shipped with thermal cameras.

Bring us your toughest thermal detection problem and we'll map a working solution.

Ask us about:

  • Solution architecture that fits your thermal cameras, sites, and alerting process
  • A live demo on your own thermal footage
  • Deployment options: edge, on-prem, air-gapped, VPC, or on the thermal cameras and network your sites already run
  • ROI modeling against intrusions, equipment failures, fires, and night-shift patrols

Over 80,000 organizations build with Roboflow.

  • Rivian
  • Pella
  • Chobani
  • USG Corporation
  • BNSF Railway
  • American Woodmark
Start where you are

Vision AI is transforming businesses

Customers across the board are solving complex challenges and driving meaningful impact.

  • Automotive customer

    $10 million

    Saved by automatically detecting defects on the production line

  • Logistics & freight company

    90%

    Less time spent manually tracking shipping inventory

  • Building materials supplier

    60%

    Lower customer return rate with improved product quality

Detect Every Object, from Dusk to Dawn and Through the Smoke

Add a detection layer that works around the clock with Roboflow Vision AI for thermal object detection. Built for perimeters, plants, rail lines, and job sites where regular cameras go blind at night, in smoke, or in glare, and a thermal camera still sees every warm body and every hot spot.

People, vehicles, and animals:

  • Detect people and vehicles in total darkness on perimeters, yards, and rail lines, as in rail trespass detection, with a model trained on your own thermal footage.
  • Spot animals on roads, runways, and fence lines at night before they become a collision or a breach.
  • Track each person and vehicle across frames so an alert fires once per intrusion, not on every frame.

Hot spots and equipment:

Thermal and RGB together:

  • Pair thermal and RGB cameras in one Workflow, with thermal covering night and smoke and RGB adding color and detail by day.
  • Run the same models on fixed cameras, drones, and vehicle-mounted thermal sensors, as in heavy equipment detection on mine sites at night.
  • Start from public thermal datasets, then fine-tune on your own footage.

Bring intelligence to every camera, every hour of the day. Stop darkness, smoke, and glare from becoming blind spots.

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Frequently asked questions

What is thermal object detection?

Thermal object detection trains a computer vision model (opens in a new tab) on thermal (infrared) images to find people, vehicles, animals, and hot spots by their heat signature. Because thermal cameras read surface temperature instead of reflected light, detection keeps working in darkness, smoke, and glare. The same approach powers hot bearing detection, solar panel inspection, and rail trespass detection.

Do I need a special model for thermal images?

No. Thermal frames train like any other image: label people, vehicles, or hot spots in your own footage, train a detection model such as RF-DETR (opens in a new tab), and deploy it. Public thermal datasets give you a head start, such as Teledyne FLIR's dataset with about 520,000 bounding box annotations and Roboflow's thermal dataset of people and dogs.

Why use a thermal camera instead of a regular camera?

Thermal cameras see heat, so a person, a vehicle, or an overheating part stands out against a cooler background with no light at all. Teledyne FLIR says its thermal sensors detect and classify in total darkness, most fog, smoke, inclement weather, and glare. Many sites pair thermal with RGB to cover both day and night.

Roboflow serves as the detection engine, and your security, safety, and maintenance teams own the zones, thresholds, and response.

Can it integrate with our security, alerting, and plant systems?

Yes. Roboflow sends detections and images over REST (opens in a new tab) or MQTT, or writes them to a database, so they land in security, maintenance, and SCADA systems. Alerts can go to Slack, email, or text, or to a PLC over OPC UA to trigger a light, a horn, or a shutdown.

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