Communications of the ACM
Tell Me Where You Are and I'll Tell You What I See
The Marmota mobile AR prototype delivers tailored information about elements of a scene that are 'actually' visible from an observation point, and excludes hidden ones.
Credit: Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) researchers have developed a system that can analyze a mobile phone-produced photo and generate information about the location. The Marmota mobile AR prototype "integrates technologies and findings from different disciplines, from cartography to computer graphics, and sophisticated machine vision algorithms," says FBK researcher Michele Zanin. The system tracks the user's location by using their phone's global positioning system and communicates with the central Marmota server. The user receives a high-resolution, 360-degree image of the scene, which, based on user priorities, can include such information as country names and altitudes.
"One of the innovative aspects of the system is that the rendering provided to the user shows aspects that are actually visible from the observation point, excluding hidden ones that, with the classic effect of a cloud of unreadable points, would create confusion," Zanin says.
The system also could be used to correlate photos taken of a landscape with synthetic three-dimensional models.
From Fondazione Bruno Kessler
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