AVILUSplus is a research and development project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It focuses on long-term technologies with needs for fundamental research. The main areas are: information management, simulation and rendering, tracking, interaction and geometry acquisition. The research department "Augmented Vision" participates in the work packages tracking and interaction with application to AR-assisted industrial maintenance (“AR Handbook”). The goal is to develop innovative methods for image-based tracking and interaction with help of spherical cameras. A head-worn spherical camera provides a field of view that is similar to the human visual system. It captures not only a central part of the frontal working area, as a standard perspective camera would do, but also the hands of the user and parts of the environment. Moreover, the change in the image content is comparatively small, even under large camera motions. For these reasons, spherical cameras can be used to solve image-based tracking and interaction with only one sensor.
The work of the department “Augmented Vision” focuses on the following aspects with special respect to the geometry of spherical cameras: modelling and automatic calibration, landmark detection, description, and tracking, pose estimation and error propagation, object recognition, color-, contour-, and shading-based hand detection, and gesture recognition.
