Thermal imaging firm IRT is getting funding from The Data Lab for AI to reduce heat loss in homes and support Scotland’s net zero strategy.

Dundee-based IRT will work alongside academics at Robert Gordon University to develop AI-based software to automatically remove redundant objects such as trees and cars from its thermal image scans, saving the organisation significant time per year in manual cropping.

The company identifies how housing developers and associations can improve the energy efficiency of their property portfolios, allowing organisation to rapidly scale and helping to create high value jobs.

IRT already has a framework to process and analyse thermal images to estimate the heat loss in homes, capturing between 300-500 properties per day. However, the process relies on staff to manually process and prepare images for analysis.

Given the automated process of other elements of this framework, IRT will use the new funding, as well as the skills provided by The Data Lab and Robert Gordon, to develop its AI solution.

The tech will allow thermal imaging firm IRT team to boost existing capability in the decarbonisation of the built environment, improving housing stock. This will work directly alongside the Scottish Government policy to address fuel poverty and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Commenting on the news, IRT CEO Stewart Little said: “Image cropping has become a very labour-intensive task for us resulting in bottlenecks for our relatively small team. This has had a direct correlation on productivity as we can lose weeks of time as we crop hundreds of images a day.

“Once the software has been developed in partnership with the brilliant team at Robert Gordon University, our team will once again be able to focus on image analysis which will increase the quality of service we provide our customers, as well as provide us with a competitive edge.

“This will also mean we can better serve our client base which will, in turn, allow us to hire more staff. In addition to meeting our ambitious growth plans, our work will further contribute to the decarbonisation of the existing building stock in Scotland.”

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Once IRT’s system is live it will speed up the pre-processing of images by 10x, allowing the firm to focus time on analysing the processed data. As a result, customers will be able to understand the energy performance of their portfolio faster.

The solution will also allow for development of a more detailed retrofit assessment for all processed properties, giving customers better insight on their property portfolios which could strengthen future retrofit funding applications through securing increased validity on the retrofit need and result.

Brian Hills, CEO at The Data Lab, said: “Seeing organisations recognise how AI could benefit them continues to drive everything that we do at The Data Lab.

“When there is the added benefit of supporting an organisation move towards a net zero future, all the while contributing to a societal change, that takes this motivation to the next level.

“This project with IRT and Robert Gordon University is a fantastic example of how important AI will be in directly addressing the challenges of delivering on Scotland’s world-leading climate change legislation.”

The software is currently in development via a team at Robert Gordon University. It is hoped that IRT will be rolling out the final solution by the end of 2022.

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