Towards Privacy-Preserving Thermal Human Perception from Dataset to Deployment

Indoor human perception is the foundation for smart homes and healthcare. However, RGB cameras raise privacy concerns in private indoor environments, while low-resolution thermal cameras provide limited spatial and semantic information. Large-scale indoor thermal datasets and real-world deployments remain limited. Here, we introduce Indoor RGB-T, a large-scale paired RGB--thermal dataset for indoor human perception. The dataset covers 20 indoor rooms and contains 90,576 80x62 thermal frames, 87,016 temporally matched RGB--thermal pairs, and 115,557 annotated human bounding boxes. We establish benchmarks for robust thermal occupant-state detection with 0.75 mAP and occupancy estimation with an accuracy of 0.847 in unseen rooms. We further evaluate RGB-to-thermal and thermal-to-RGB translation, achieving a temperature MAE of 0.654 C and an R2 of 0.923. Finally, we deploy the thermal perception model on a commercial sleep-monitoring system in the real world. Field testing with 100 participants and deployment of approximately 1,000 devices further demonstrate its practical feasibility. We identify practical challenges that motivate future research directions, including environmental thermal interference, sensing range and multi-person occlusion. The code, trained models and partial dataset are available at https://github.com/kailaisun/RGBT and https://huggingface.co/skl24/RGBT.