  In the last decade, the computer vision field has seen significant progress
in multimodal data fusion and learning, where multiple sensors, including
depth, infrared, and visual, are used to capture the environment across diverse
spectral ranges. Despite these advancements, there has been no systematic and
comprehensive evaluation of fusing RGB-D and thermal modalities to date. While
autonomous driving using LiDAR, radar, RGB, and other sensors has garnered
substantial research interest, along with the fusion of RGB and depth
modalities, the integration of thermal cameras and, specifically, the fusion of
RGB-D and thermal data, has received comparatively less attention. This might
be partly due to the limited number of publicly available datasets for such
applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of both,
state-of-the-art and traditional methods used in fusing RGB-D and thermal
camera data for various applications, such as site inspection, human tracking,
fault detection, and others. The reviewed literature has been categorised into
technical areas, such as 3D reconstruction, segmentation, object detection,
available datasets, and other related topics. Following a brief introduction
and an overview of the methodology, the study delves into calibration and
registration techniques, then examines thermal visualisation and 3D
reconstruction, before discussing the application of classic feature-based
techniques as well as modern deep learning approaches. The paper concludes with
a discourse on current limitations and potential future research directions. It
is hoped that this survey will serve as a valuable reference for researchers
looking to familiarise themselves with the latest advancements and contribute
to the RGB-DT research field.
