An infrared (IR) thermal camera may provide a tool for real-time temperature monitoring for precise disease treatment using heat generated by light-induced photosensitisers, i.e. photothermal/ablation therapies. In this work, we quantitatively demonstrated that the spatial resolution of a low-cost low-resolution IR camera could be improved via two deconvolution methods. The camera point spread function was modelled experimentally and used to develop the deconvolution methods: (1) Richardson–Lucy blind deconvolution (BD); and (2) total variation constrained deconvolution (TD). The experimental results showed the improved spatial resolution (at 50% modulation transfer function: from the original 1.1 to 2.6 cycles/mm for the BD method and to 4.8 cycles/mm for the TD method) as well as contrast-to-noise ratio. With a properly chosen parameter, the TD method can resolve 1-mm size objects with the accurate temperature reading. The thermal image from the low-resolution IR camera enhanced by the TD method is comparable to that from a high-resolution IR camera. These results show that the TD method provides an effective way to improve the thermal image quality from a low-cost IR camera to monitor temperature of an object of 1-mm size, which meets the needed precision for advanced laser scanning protocols in photothermal/ablation therapies.

红外（IR）热像仪可提供实时温度监控工具，以利用光诱导的光敏剂（即光热/消融疗法）产生的热量进行精确的疾病治疗。在这项工作中，我们定量地证明了可以通过两种反卷积方法来提高低成本低分辨率红外摄像机的空间分辨率。相机点扩散函数通过实验建模，并用于开发反卷积方法：（1）理查森-露西盲目反卷积（BD）；（2）总变化约束反卷积（TD）。实验结果表明，空间分辨率得到了改善（在50％调制传递函数下：BD方法从最初的1.1到2.6个循环/毫米，TD方法从4.8个循环/毫米提高到）。使用正确选择的参数，TD方法可以解析1毫米大小的物体，并具有准确的温度读数。通过TD方法增强的低分辨率红外热像仪产生的热图像可与高分辨率红外热像仪产生的热图像相比。这些结果表明，TD方法提供了一种有效的方法来改善低成本红外热像仪监视1毫米大小物体的温度的热图像质量，从而满足光热/烧蚀中高级激光扫描协议所需的精度。疗法。