Scene creation and exploration in outdoor augmented reality

This thesis investigates Outdoor Augmented Reality (AR) especially for scene creation and exploration aspects.We decompose a scene into several components: a) Device, b) Target Object(s), c) Task, and discuss their interrelations. Based on those relations we outline use-cases and workflows. The main contribution of this thesis is providing AR oriented workflows for selected professional fields specifically for scene creation and exploration purposes, through case studies as well as analyzing the relations between AR scene components. Our contributions inlude, but not limited to: i) analysis of scene components and factoring inherintly available errors, to create a transitional hybrid tracking scheme for multiple targets, ii) a novel image-based approach that uses building block analogy for modelling and introduces volumetric and temporal labeling for annotations, iii) an evaluation of the state of the art X-Ray visualization methods as well as our proposed multi-view method. AR technology and capabilities tend to change rapidly, however we believe the relation between scene components and the practical advantages their analysis provide are valuable. Moreover, we have chosen case studies as diverse as possible in order to cover a wide range of professional field studies. We believe our research is extendible to a variety of field studies for disciplines including but not limited to: Archaeology, architecture, cultural heritage, tourism, stratigraphy, civil engineering, and urban maintenance