A Standalone Markerless 3D Tracker for Handheld Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a markerless 3D hand-held augmented reality tracker optimized for mobile devices, utilizing adapted computer vision libraries and edge-based model tracking to enable real-time AR applications on constrained hardware.

Contribution

It presents a portable, fixed-point math-based computer vision library port and an edge-based model tracking method suitable for handheld AR on Windows Mobile devices.

Findings

Achieved real-time tracking performance on Pocket PC devices.

Demonstrated effective AR application with acceptable accuracy.

Utilized graphics hardware acceleration for improved processing.

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of a markerless tracking technique targeted to the Windows Mobile Pocket PC platform. The primary aim of this work is to allow the development of standalone augmented reality applications for handheld devices based on natural feature tracking. In order to achieve this goal, a subset of two computer vision libraries was ported to the Pocket PC platform. They were also adapted to use fixed point math, with the purpose of improving the overall performance of the routines. The port of these libraries opens up the possibility of having other computer vision tasks being executed on mobile platforms. A model based tracking approach that relies on edge information was adopted. Since it does not require a high processing power, it is suitable for constrained devices such as handhelds. The OpenGL ES graphics library was used to perform computer vision tasks, taking advantage of existing graphics hardware acceleration. An augmented reality application was created using the implemented technique and evaluations were done regarding tracking performance and accuracy