# Feature Launch: Thermal with Depth

Generate thermal imagery with pixel-aligned depth maps from a single Bifrost render.

Thermal with Depth is now available as a render output.

Maritime perception models earn their keep in the conditions cameras hate: night, fog, glare off the water. Thermal sensors see through all of it - but detection alone isn't enough. Your model also needs to know how far away that vessel is. That's where depth comes in.

Collecting real-world thermal footage with aligned range data is slow and expensive. Now you can render both from the same simulated scene.

## What's New

- Thermal with Depth render output: thermal imagery plus a per-pixel depth map from a single render
- One-line setup - switch your render params and you're done
- Both outputs come from the same scene, so thermal and depth are pixel-aligned by construction - no cross-sensor calibration or registration step

### Getting started

Change your render params to the new mode:

```
render_params = RenderParams.ThermalWithDepth()
```

Every frame now ships with a thermal image and its matching depth map.

### Why thermal + depth

Pairing the two modalities unlocks training data that's hard to capture in the real world:

- **Multi-modal sensor training.** Train and evaluate models that fuse thermal with range information, with ground truth for both.
- **Range estimation.** Per-pixel depth gives you exact distance labels for every detection in the thermal frame.
- **Low-visibility detection.** Build datasets for the scenarios that matter most - small targets at night, vessels in fog - with depth ground truth attached.

For the details, see our docs on [thermal rendering](https://docs.app.bifrost.ai/how-to-guides/thermal.html) and [depth metadata](https://docs.app.bifrost.ai/how-to-guides/bifrost-metadata-depth.html).

## Put it to work

Thermal with Depth is live now. Switch your render params and generate your first multi-modal dataset today.

Working on low-visibility perception? [Get in touch](/content/contact/index.html)