Thermal vision in medicine, industry, and ecology. Foreword from the honorary chairman of the conference

The S. I. Vavilov State Optical Institute (GOI) and the D. S. Rozhdestvenskiı˘ Optical Society held the eighteenth (since 1971) scientific–practical conference “Thermal Vision in Medicine, Industry, and Ecology (TeMP-2014),” Section 4 of the International Conference of Applied Optics 2014 (PO-2014) in St. Petersburg on October 23 and 24, 2014.
The time at which the conference was held coincided with important landmarks of the development of thermal vision, which was covered in one of the sections on applied optics (techniques of IR radiation). It was directly preceded (on December 20, 2013) by the official resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations to declare 2015 the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies, and this makes it possible to hope for a renewal of the prestige of the science of light—optics and optical engineering—in Russia.
Moreover, 2014 made fifty years since the beginning of development (the creation of an experimental sample and its clinical testing) of the first Soviet commercial medical thermal viewer, the “Rubin,” which ensured, along with other domestic and foreign devices, the successful application of thermal vision (thermography) in wide clinical practice (412 thermal-vision diagnostic units in 350 cities of the country were operating in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1990s).
The present issue of Opticheskií Zhurnal includes reports on civilian thermal vision (medicine, industry, and ecology), selected by the Program Committee and the Editorial Staff and presented at the TeMP-2014 conference by specialists from various cities of Russia.
Most of the reports had a high scientific level, and they all reflected sincere striving by the speakers—enthusiasts in thermal vision—to promote further development of this promising specialization in early medical diagnosis and nondestructive testing (defectoscopy) in various regions of industry and studies of natural resources.