Why is thermal imaging textureless

Thermal imaging can enable night vision but is usually textureless, well-known as the ghosting effect. The mechanism of this ghosting effect has recently been explained, and TeX vision has been proposed to overcome the ghosting effect. However, it is still unknown for realistic scenarios with non-uniform temperature whether TeX vision can correctly recover geometric textures and how its performance is compared with traditional thermal imaging. Here, we focus on the interplay of geometric textures and non-uniform temperature which is common in realistic thermal imaging, and demonstrate the failure of traditional approaches while TeX vision successfully recovers geometric textures. We also analyze important yet unexplored aspects of the TeX vision theory, and demonstrate a true night vision like broad daylight with the experimentally more feasible Bayer-filter setup. This deepens the understanding of the ghosting effect and bridges the gap between the TeX vision theory and the consumer thermal-imaging market.