ISMAR 2011 Paper Highlights

My favorite papers presented at ISMAR 2011.


Robust Planar Target Tracking and Pose Estimation from a Single Concavity
Michael Donoser, Peter Kontschieder, Horst Bischof
Graz University of Technology

"The basic idea is to adapt the classic tracking-by-detection approach, which seeks for the object to be tracked independently in each frame, for tracking non-textured objects. In order to robustly estimate the 3D pose of such objects in each frame, we have to tackle three demanding problems. First, we need to find a stable representation of the object which is discriminable against the background and highly repetitive. Second, we have to robustly relocate this representation in every frame, also during considerable viewpoint changes. Finally, we have to estimate the pose from a single,closed object contour"

ISMAR 2011 - Tracking Contest Impressions

Some impressions of the Metaio team during the tracking competition at ISMAR 2011 in Basel. Finally they got the best score and won the contest. The contestants had to go through a parcour with various challenges for their tracking system.

The goal was to determine exact positions in the real world from single 3D world coordinates. The parcour contained relatively complex environments, like a car or specular setups with mirrors.

Metaio used their Juneio system on a Samsung Galaxy S with Android.

via Junaio Blog

Javascript based Natural Feature Tracking enables markerless AR in the browser

Coming back from ISMAR 2011 in Basel, I could see a very interesting project by developed by Christoph Oberhofer, Jens Grubert, Gerhard Reitmayr (ICG Graz University of Technology - Austria). It proofs that a reliable and performant natural feature based tracking can actually be implemented in Javascript, HTML5 and WebGL.

There are still a lot of issues especially with the access to live video, but results are already impressive. One has to imagine that this runs entirely on a single website.

The demo runs also on an Android phone with Firefox Beta. Of course not as fluide as on a PC, but still with reasonable interactive framerates. Chrome and Opera alpha were used for the desktop demo. Interestingly it was not running on Firefox on PC.

This work is a very good example of the pace of innovation regarding cutting edge augmented reality applications. There is no need for additional plugins, like FLARToolkit. See my post on that. It runs directly in your browser. It is clearly another possibility to bring augmented reality closer to the a broader public.

We can only imagine what will be possible, when the browser support of HTML5, WebGL and Javascript will be significantly improved and technologies like WebCL will come in play.

Great work

Upcoming ISMAR 2011 - Demos

Hi there,

next week (26.10.-29.10.) the ISMAR conference will take place in Basel (Switzerland). The premier international conference on research, technology and application in Mixed and Augmented Reality. It's becoming THE reference for research on (mobile) augmented reality.

After a first look on the program I hope to see a lot of great AR technology, listen to amazing paper presentations and meet interesting people.

Here is a small preview of tech demos I think will be interesting and hopefully will show new and innovative directions for future AR applications.

Interesting paper presented at ISMAR 2010 "Interactive Modelling for AR Applications"

"The paper Real-time Modelling for AR Applications won second prize in the best paper awards at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2010 in Seoul, Korea.

The paper describes a method for generating 3D models of objects which requires minimal user interaction.  The motivation was the desire to allow users to create special effects to video as it is captures.  The interface is thus suitable for implementation on a video camera or phone.

The paper is available here."