Robot Vision Group

National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition

Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Augmented Reality for Mobile Phones

(Supproted by Nokia Research Center Europe)

Background

Augmented Reality (AR) has made significant progress in many domains, such as maintenance and repair, annotation, entertainment and education etc. AR involves combining computer generated virtual objects with real scenes. With the hardware’s development of mobile phones, the mobile phones have become the ideal platform for AR. 2D and 3D real-time tracking are critical component for high-quality user experience of AR. To use the mobile landmark recognition and AR system which provides a mobile tourist guide for travelers as an example to demonstrate the role of the real-time tracking (see Fig.1).

Fig.1 The work-flow of a mobile landmark recognition and AR system

In the system, an interested region in the video captured by a mobile phone is specified by a user and the 2D real-time object tracking is running on the mobile phone. Then the augmented information which supplies by the server is accurately overlaid on the region.

Some Results

We present an augmented reality system which superimposes a picture on the specified region on a NOKIA N900 phone. Fig. 2 shows some typical results of experiment under some conditions, such as rotation and translation (b), tracking failure (c) and recovery (d).

Fig. 2 Augmented results under some conditions