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Publications in Scientific Journals:

M. Hornacek, H. Kueffner-McCauley, M. Trimmel, P. Rupprecht, S. Schlund:
"A spatial AR system for wide-area axis-aligned metric augmentation of planar scenes";
CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology, 37 (2022), Mai; 219 - 226.



English abstract:
Augmented reality (AR) promises to enable use cases in industrial settings that include the embedding of assembly instructions directly into the scene, potentially reducing or altogether obviating the need for workers to refer to such instructions in paper form or on a statically situated screen. Spatial AR, in turn, is a form of AR whereby the augmentation of the scene is carried out using a projector, with the advantage of rendering the augmentation visible to all onlookers simultaneously without calling for any to hold a handheld device such as a tablet or for each to wear some form of head-mounted display. In carrying out spatial AR, however, care must be taken to appropriately warp the image to be projected such that it, when projected, appear free of projective distortions to the viewer. For planar scene geometry (such as a floor, wall, or table), a manual process called keystone correction can be used to carry out an appropriate corrective image warp, a process that can be cumbersome. Another drawback of conventional spatial AR relying only on a single projector is that it is capable of augmenting only the portion of the scene within the projector´s static field of view, thereby hindering its applicability to use cases calling for augmentation of wide areas such as a factory floorspace.

We propose a spatial AR system for wide-area metric augmentation of planar scene surfaces that produces the effect of keystone correction analytically as a function of the relative geometry of the projector and scene plane, using a projector equipped with a steerable mirror to direct the projection across varying target locations and a camera facing the scene plane in support of calibrating the system. Our system renders the placement of augmentations in the scene more intuitive than manual keystone correction in two ways. First, (i) the horizontal and vertical axes of the desired augmentations are set in accordance with the horizontal and vertical image axes of the camera, thereby making setting those axes as simple as appropriately rotating the camera relative to the scene plane, and thereby providing a consistent axial reference frame across all target locations. Second, (ii) the desired dimensions of the projected augmentations are specified in metric terms, thereby providing for consistent scaling, likewise across all target locations.

Keywords:
Spatial augmented reality (SAR) Computer vision Steerable mirror projector Projector-camera calibration Industry 4.0


"Official" electronic version of the publication (accessed through its Digital Object Identifier - DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cirpj.2022.01.011


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.