Seeing the Heat: Synthesizing High-Resolution Wood Thermal Responses from Optical Imagery

The thermal behavior of wood is a critical factor in advanced material assembly. However, pixel-level thermal analysis remains fundamentally constrained by the low resolution and noise inherent to infrared thermography. To address this, we introduce an end-to-end computational framework that synthesizes high-resolution thermal responses directly from wood RGB images. We first establish a core physical linkage: because spatial color variation in natural wood is driven by cellular anatomy, optical intensity serves as a reliable geometric proxy for the localized solid volume fraction. By leveraging this theoretical insight, we develop an automated finite-element-method data engine that maps pixel-level optical intensity to a 3D thermodynamic voxel grid, generating high-fidelity synthetic thermal responses. We find that 1) when the thermal conductivity along the thickness direction is uniform or linear, wood RGB images and their corresponding thermal responses exhibit extreme morphological similarities, and the lateral thermal diffusion acts as a low-pass filter that smooths out high-frequency details; 2) when the thermal conductivity along the thickness direction is random, such morphological similarities are destroyed, and wood's 3D structure dominantly governs its thermal response. We further utilize these synthetic thermal responses to supervise a neural surrogate model built upon the DINOv3 foundation model. Our results demonstrate that the neural surrogate model successfully internalizes the governing thermodynamic laws, thereby bypassing computationally expensive simulations and enabling high-resolution thermal inference. This methodology effectively bridges the semantic and thermodynamic domains, unlocking systematic, pixel-level analysis of fine-grained wood thermal responses. Project: https://zekifayes.github.io/seeheat