Visual Tracking for Augmented Reality: No Universal Solution but Many Powerful Building Blocks

Visual Tracking for Augmented Reality: No Universal Solution but Many Powerful Building Blocks
Mario Becker, Gabriele Bleser-Taetz, Alain Pagani, Yulian Pastarmov, Didier Stricker, Florent Vial, Jens Weidenhausen, Cédric Wohlleber, Harald Wuest
In: Proceedings. GI-Workshop "Virtuelle und Erweiterte Realität" (GI VR/AR-2005), 2005.

Abstract:
In this paper, we present an overview of several visual tracking methods for industrial augmented reality applications. We show that no universal algorithm can deal with the large number of possible scenes, and that the different methods have to be seen as complementary approaches that all have their strengths and weaknesses. The main difficulty, then, consists in combining existing building blocks in the right manner so that the overall system enables stable tracking. This paper addresses each phase of the tracking, i.e. Initialization, Tracking, ReInitialization, and proposes a first choice of appropriate algorithms. Finally, a global system is designed, tested and evaluated with help of video sequences of different real environments.