Markus Tarin, President and CEO of MoviTHERM, joins Jimmy Carroll on the Manufacturing Matters podcast to discuss improving awareness of thermal imaging applications in industrial applications, starting with the traditional and unexplored uses of the technology in machine vision.

One of the most familiar uses for thermal imaging is inspecting packaging for leaks. On the nontraditional side, the company worked on a documentary to make CO2 visible, showing viewers what greenhouse gas exhaust looks like. But the main game changer for moviTHERM has been moving software functionality from the PC to the IoT.

Now, an “intelligent gateway” communicates to all cameras and provides real-time monitoring locally, while the cloud offers notification and situational awareness capabilities. “It lets us rapidly scale and deploy any application…without passing on engineering or hardware costs to the customer,” Tarin says.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:07] Hi, everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing.  We’re here at the A3 Business Forum 2023 in Orlando on the set of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, and I have the privilege of being joined by Markus Tarin. Markus, thanks so much for taking the time today.

Markus Tarin: [00:00:21] Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:23] Sure. Yeah. So Markus, MoviTHERM is both an integrator and a distributor. Do I have that right? Could you maybe dive into what you do there and what your company does?

Markus Tarin: [00:00:32] Yeah, absolutely. So MoviTHERM stands for “motion vision thermography.” We specialize in thermal imaging solutions. And as you mentioned, we’re kind of a hybrid company in that we’re a systems integrator, solutions provider, and distributor. And we provide, as the name says, thermal imaging solutions.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:50] So that means both, I’m assuming, traditional and nontraditional machine vision applications. Is that the case?

Markus Tarin: [00:00:57] Yes, I would say so. You know, for the listeners that are familiar with the traditional machine vision world, I think we do certainly things that are typically outside of the realm of traditional machine vision.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:01:09] So let’s talk a little bit maybe about some of the fun applications that are beyond the factory floor and then maybe some of the more traditional machine vision applications where you see a lot of installations.

Markus Tarin: [00:01:18] Sure. Yeah. The funnest one that comes to mind is we were actually hired by actor and singer Jared Leto. Originally it started out as: Do our music video all in thermal in complete darkness. And then we’re like, that sounds like fun. Let’s do this. And in the middle of doing this whole thing, they were like, well, why don’t we do this live at the Video Music Awards show? And we’re like, well, these cameras are not really intended to be live equipment because they have to be tethered to a laptop, and you have to do adjustments on a software and all those kind of things. They’re more like scientific measurement instruments. But he convinced us, to say it slightly, to do this anyway, to pull this off. And we did this. It took us about three and a half weeks to get there. We programmed custom software to be able to adjust the camera settings on the fly, you know, based on a cue from the director and everything else. And we did this. So we actually broadcast it to I think 12 million people live. You know and actually did their signal walk on water. And you can actually you can see this on YouTube. It’s still up there.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:02:30] That’s very cool. So that to me is a prime example of something when if you’re at a holiday or a dinner party or something, and somebody asks you what you do, you can share that example because, while it’s obviously very useful, applications involving, let’s say, defect inspection are maybe a little less interesting to the average person. So that is very cool. Now on that note, though, things like defect inspection in traditional machine vision, there’s a lot of applications for thermal data. Is that right?

Markus Tarin: [00:02:59] Yeah. Every time, if you think about it, heat is omnipresent, right? It’s either something that is desirable if you’re heating something up, for instance, like plastic inspection, if you want to seal the plastic foil to a plastic container, something like this, it’s typically done with heat. It could be done with ultrasound, but for the most part, it’s done with heat. So the question then always becomes, well, did we put enough heat in? Did we put enough pressure in? How do we know that the seal is really tight, so that the container doesn’t have any leakage? That’s especially true for sterile packaging and medical, pharmaceutical type of applications. But even food. Nobody wants to have a messy container leaking on the way home from the grocery store or something like that. So those are kind of applications that we solve with thermal imaging in the automation world.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:42] Sure. Now, so both both in the industry and beyond, you know, people are familiar with thermal imaging cameras, but I’m not sure if there are as many well-defined applications of thermal imaging as there should be. So what’s that say about the industry knowledge of thermal imaging and where do you see that? Do you think that there’s a lot more unexplored applications for the technology?

Markus Tarin: [00:04:04] Definitely, I always pride myself and my team with we kind of invented the automated thermal imaging, because back in the days – we started about 23 years ago – and there wasn’t really anything there. I mean, it was unheard of to even write software for a thermal camera. You know, it came with a prepackaged software from the manufacturer. So we were actually approached by FLIR, one of the largest thermal camera manufacturers, saying, hey, can you automate this process for us? Our customer wants to take automated measurements, right? So that’s how we kind of got started in the industry.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:04:36] Markus, talk to me a little bit, if you could, about maybe the industry knowledge of thermal imaging. It seems to me that there maybe aren’t as many well-defined applications of thermal imaging as there should be, particularly in the industrial space. Is that the case? And if so, could you talk about that a little bit?

Markus Tarin: [00:04:52] Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. The awareness isn’t there. You know, a lot of customers may have an auxiliary sort of an awareness for thermal imaging, mainly coming maybe from movies and somebody chasing somebody on a helicopter and doing surveillance or night vision-type applications. But really from an industrial point of view, I think very few people out there are aware of what you can do and what can be done with it. And it really comes down to heat. Measuring heat and making heat visible, which really that’s where the magic kind of happens with thermal imaging, right?

Jimmy Carroll: [00:05:24] Sure. So, you know, one I guess well-defined application is nondestructive testing, and that must be a really common one for you. What are some of the things that people are using thermal cameras for in nondestructive testing that you see a lot of lately?

Markus Tarin: [00:05:38] Yeah. So we’re primarily operating there in the aerospace, defense, and also commercial air space world. With the onset of new materials such as carbon composites and those kind of things, the question there is, are there any defects? Are there any delaminations, foreign objects or something inside the material? And that’s actually what’s really special about thermal imaging. We have the ability to quote, unquote see into the material below the surface. No other machine vision application can typically claim being able to see inside something, maybe with the exception of X-rays or something. But that’s why we call it often also thermal X-ray, because we can actually see, by calculation we can see what’s happening inside the material. So if there’s a delamination, a heat wave propagates into the material, comes back to the surface. And by the disturbance on the surface of that heat signature, we can back calculate what happened inside the material. You know, in a very brief nutshell. I know it’s fairly complex.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:34] No worries. What are some other ways that thermal imaging cameras can augment existing traditional visible light machine vision systems?

Markus Tarin: [00:06:43] So, yeah, I mean, the obvious candidates are any time you need to see heat, right? That’s one of those things. But there’s also wavelength-specific situations where if you needed to see through a container, for instance, right? So there are certain plastics that have transparency in certain wavelengths of thermal or short wave, mid-wave, long wave infrared. We can see things like this. We can also do optical gas imaging. We can make gases visible, which is phenomenal, right? So if you wanted to look for a gas leak or something like this, we actually did a documentary with a company making CO2 gas visible. And in terms of greenhouse gases, to actually show people. Everybody talks about it. But if you can actually see exhausting CO2, you can actually visualize it, much better understand what that means.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:28] It’s very interesting and also probably very horrifying. You know, among the different, let’s say, hot topics over the over the last few years, IoT is one of those I think that ranks up there for a lot of people. And I believe that you recently introduced an IoT platform. Want to talk a little bit about that and how that works within the landscape of thermal imaging?.

Markus Tarin: [00:07:51] Yeah, so this really came out of an evolutionary sort of a need. We used to do the traditional approach of programming the software, putting it up on a PC, deploying the PC, and all those kind of things. And there was the same development cycle always repeating itself, and it added a lot of cost to it. And it wasn’t very scalable because one customer needed two cameras, the other one needed 15. So it’s very difficult to structure that that way. So we decided to invest into a cloud platform, an IoT platform, and put all the software functionality for thermal imaging up there. And now we have developed an intelligent gateway that basically talks to all the cameras locally on the factory floor and provides real-time monitoring capability on the factory floor, while the cloud provides notification capabilities and situational awareness. And it lets us basically scale any sort of application rapidly and deploy. I mean, within days we can deploy multi-camera applications around the world and give people the visibility.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:08:49] Markus, I meant to ask it a few minutes ago, but what are some of the bands that you operate in typically?

Markus Tarin: [00:08:55] Yeah. So wave bands I’m assuming this is what you’re talking about. So we cover the short wave infrared, mid-wave, and long wave. Short wave is kind of from 0.9 microns to like 1.7. And then we go into the mid-wave is typically 3 to 5 microns, and then we have the long wave, like 7 to 14 microns.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:09:14] Markus, in terms of advancements in thermal imaging over the past couple of years, both in systems, whether application-specific or otherwise, or in products, what are you most excited about?

Markus Tarin: [00:09:25] Yeah, so as I mentioned before, the IoT really has been a game-changer for us because we can now deploy so quickly and scale without passing on any sort of engineering cost or hardware cost to the customer. They basically are just on the hook for paying for the sensors, aka the cameras in that sense. And that provides a lot of value to them, and there’s no life cycle management of the solution and those kind of things. And then we are in certain vertical market solutions that we have identified and produced solutions for, such as package inspection and bottle cap inspection. And on the bottle cap inspection, that little silver foil that you have to peel off on the bottle. And the way that’s being put together is the silver foil is inside the cap. The cap is being capped on, and then the bottle runs underneath an inductive sealer, and then it heats up the aluminum foil. And the pressure of the cap seals it against the mouth of the bottle. And then the question is, okay, has it sealed or not? So people have to typically unscrew it again and look at it. And is it sealed? Because you can’t see through the cap? Well the thermal imaging camera allows us to do that. We can see the heat signature of that seal. And now we can determine in real time, in full production, whether that seal was put on properly. So it’s a huge value add for quality inspection.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:42] Sure. Yeah. Well, you’re a very patient, man, for peeling it off. Usually I have to stab it with something.

Markus Tarin: [00:10:46] Or that.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:48] Markus, what else? What else haven’t I asked about that you’re excited about for the industry for this year or the next couple of years going forward?

Markus Tarin: [00:10:56] Right, so we always feel a little bit lonely because, you know, I say that because we’re such an outsider it feels like to the traditional machine vision world, which I actually come from. I’ve done a lot of 2D imaging applications and 3D and everything else, and we decided to really go into thermal because we really see such a huge potential still there and not a whole lot of solutions out there. And you know, there’s so many applications. We’re in condition monitoring, machine condition monitoring, seeing heat. We’re in process monitoring applications and bringing more and more of that into our cloud platform and really making it accessible to a lot of folks out there. That’s really what we’re trying to do.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:11:37] That’s great. I like that. Markus, the last thing I want to mention is I believe you launched a podcast recently, “The Thermal Review.” Do you want to mention that?

Markus Tarin: [00:11:44] Yeah, we have actually just recorded Episode 9, “The Thermal Review,” and you can see that on all the major platforms such as Spotify. You can see the video version on our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/Movitherm and iTunes and all those big things. And we’re super excited where it’s fully educational. So if anybody wants to tune in and learn more about thermal imaging, that’s really what this is about. We’re trying to educate it out there and boil it down to hopefully that everybody can understand. I mean, sometimes we geek out on things. But, yeah, the hope is really to create more awareness out there and explain to folks what this technology can and cannot do.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:12:20] Well, that’s great. I would encourage everybody to go ahead and check that out. And thanks for joining us today. Markus, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Markus Tarin: [00:12:28] Yeah, thanks for having me.