Rigid Object Tracking Algorithms for Low-Cost AR Devices

Augmented reality (AR) applications rely on robust and efficient methods for tracking. Tracking methods use a computer-internal representation of the object to track, which can be either sparse or dense representations. Sparse representations use only a limited set of feature points to represent an object to track, whereas dense representations almost mimic the shape of an object. While algorithms performed on sparse representations are faster, dense representations can distinguish multiple objects. The research presented in this paper investigates the feasibility of a dense tracking method for rigid object tracking, which incorporates the both object identification and object tracking steps. We adopted a tracking method that has been developed for the Microsoft Kinect to support single object tracking. The paper describes this method and presents the results. We also compared two different methods for mesh reconstruction in this algorithm. Since meshes are more informative when identifying a rigid object, this comparison indicates which algorithm shows the best performance for this task and guides our future research efforts

Comparison of Natural Feature Descriptors for Rigid-Object Tracking for Real-Time Augmented Reality

This paper presents a comparison of natural feature descrip- tors for rigid object tracking for augmented reality (AR) applica- tions. AR relies on object tracking in order to identify a physical object and to superimpose virtual object on an object. Natu- ral feature tracking (NFT) is one approach for computer vision- based object tracking. NFT utilizes interest points of a physcial object, represents them as descriptors, and matches the descrip- tors against reference descriptors in order to identify a phsical object to track. In this research, we investigate four different nat- ural feature descriptors (SIFT, SURF, FREAK, ORB) and their capability to track rigid objects. Rigid objects need robust de- scriptors since they need to describe the objects in a 3D space. AR applications are also real-time application, thus, fast feature matching is mandatory. FREAK and ORB are binary descriptors, which promise a higher performance in comparison to SIFT and SURF. We deployed a test in which we match feature descriptors to artificial rigid objects. The results indicate that the SIFT de- scriptor is the most promising solution in our addressed domain, AR-based assembly training