The Mobile AR Sensor Logger for Android and iOS Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mobile AR sensor logger for Android and iOS that synchronizes camera and IMU data at 30Hz, facilitating AR and robotics research by providing rich, raw sensor data.

Contribution

It presents a flexible, synchronized sensor logging tool for mobile devices, improving data collection for AR and robotics applications.

Findings

Effective synchronization of camera and IMU data on mobile devices

High-frequency image recording at about 30Hz

Open source availability for research use

Abstract

In recent years, commodity mobile devices equipped with cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) have attracted much research and design effort for augmented reality (AR) and robotics applications. Based on such sensors, many commercial AR toolkits and public benchmark datasets have been made available to accelerate hatching and validating new ideas. To lower the difficulty and enhance the flexibility in accessing the rich raw data of typical AR sensors on mobile devices, this paper present the mobile AR sensor (MARS) logger for two of the most popular mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. The logger highlights the best possible synchronization between the camera and the IMU allowed by a mobile device, and efficient saving of images at about 30Hz, and recording the metadata relevant to AR applications. This logger has been tested on a relatively large spectrum of mobile devices, and the collected data has been used for analyzing the sensor characteristics. We see that this application will facilitate research and development related to AR and robotics, so it has been open sourced at https://github.com/OSUPCVLab/mobile-ar-sensor-logger.