A generalized registration method for augmented reality systems

In augmented reality systems, registration is one of the most difficult problems currently limiting their applications. In this paper, we propose a generalized registration method using projective reconstruction technique in computer vision. This registration method is composed of embedding and tracking. Embedding involves specifying four points to build the world coordinate system on which a virtual object will be superimposed. In this stage, any arbitrary two unrelated images or any 3×4 projective matrices with rank 3 can be used to calculate the 3D pseudo-projective coordinates of the four specified points. In the tracking process, these 3D pseudo-projective coordinates are used to track the four specified points to compute the registration matrix for augmentation. The proposed method is simple, as only four points need to be specified at the embedding stage, and the virtual object can then be easily augmented onto a real scene from a video sequence. One advantage is that the virtual objects can still be superimposed on the specified regions even when the regions are occluded in the video sequence. Another advantage of the proposed method is that the registration errors can be adjusted in real-time to ensure that they are less than certain thresholds that have been specified at the initial embedding stage. Several experiments have been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed generalized method.