Section: Overall Objectives

Augmented Reality

The basic concept of Augmented Reality (AR) is to place information correctly registered with the environment into the user's perception. What makes AR stand out is that this new technology offers the potential for big changes in many application fields such as industrial maintenance, creative technologies, image guided medical gestures, entertainment...

Augmented reality technologies have made major advances in recent years, both in terms of capability, mobile development and integration into current mobile devices. Most applications are dedicated to multimedia and entertainment, games, lifestyle and healthcare and use rough localization information provided by the sensors of the mobile phones. Cutting-edge augmented reality applications which take place in complex environments and require high accuracy in augmentation are less prevalent. There are indeed still technological barriers that prevent applications from reaching the robustness and the accuracy required by such applications.

The aim of the MAGRIT project is to develop vision-based methods which allow significant progress of AR technologies in terms of ease of implementation, reliability and robustness. An expected consequence is the widening of the current application field of AR.

The team is active in both medical and classical applications of augmented reality for which accurate integration of the virtual objects within the scene is essential. Key requirements of AR systems are the availability of registration techniques, both rigid and elastic, that allow the virtual objects to be correctly aligned with the environment, as well as means to build 3D models which are appropriate for pose computation and for handling interactions between the virtual objects and the real scene. Considering the common needs for tracking, navigation, advanced modeling and visualization technologies in both medical and industrial applications, the team focuses on three main objectives: matching, localization and modeling. Methods are developed with a view to meet the expected robustness and accuracy over time and to provide the user with a realistic perception of the augmented scene, while satisfying the real-time achievements required by these procedures.