OCCLUSION METHOD BASED ON THREE-DIMENSIONAL FEATURE DATA FOR MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY APPLICATIONS

Abstract

 In recent years, the demand for augmented reality (AR) applications has been increasing owing to the spread of smartphones equipped with cameras and various sensors. Hence, there is a need for a highspeed processing method to build three-dimensional (3D) AR applications on mobile devices. In particular, an occlusion process, which determines the virtual object to be drawn on the real image, is indispensable. However, this process requires dynamic depth data of objects in real and virtual spaces in accordance with the movement of the camera.
 In this paper, we developed an evaluation application, which uses an occlusion method that cuts out a virtual model by the 3D feature model obtained from real space. The application was developed by using the Unity game engine, which provides realistic rendering functions and compatibility with various sensors in smartphones with an occlusion program that uses OpenGL shader.
 As a result, the developed AR application performed the occlusion process without sacrificing processing power. The development of AR applications requires careful consideration of processing speed and accuracy in accordance with the requirements of presentation. In the future, development of a more realistic representation technique and a simple method to retrieve depth data dynamically from real space will be necessary.