Mobile augmented reality: Applications and specific technical issues

Abstract

Although man has become sedentary over time, his wish to travel the world remains as strong as ever. The aim of this paper is to show how techniques based on imagery and Augmented Reality (AR) can prove to be of great help when discovering a new urban environment and observing the evolution of the natural environment. The study's support is naturally the Smartphone which in just a few years has become our most familiar device, which we take with us practically everywhere we go in our daily lives. In this chapter, we discuss technical issues of augmented reality. We deal especially with building recognition. Our building recognition method is based on an efficient hybrid approach, which combines the potentials of SURF features points and features lines. Our method relies on ANNS (Approximate Nearest Neighbors Search) approach, described by Muja et al. [11]. ANNS approaches are known for their speed but they are less accurate than linear algorithms. To assure an optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy, the proposed method performs a filtering step on the top of the Approximate Nearest Neighbors Search. At the last step, our method calls Hausdorff measure [15] with line models. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.