Le Cui

Rui Huang, Chuan Fang, Kejie Qiu et al.

Augmented reality (AR) has gained increasingly attention from both research and industry communities. By overlaying digital information and content onto the physical world, AR enables users to experience the world in a more informative and efficient manner. As a major building block for AR systems, localization aims at determining the device's pose from a pre-built "map" consisting of visual and depth information in a known environment. While the localization problem has been widely studied in the literature, the "map" for AR systems is rarely discussed. In this paper, we introduce the AR Map for a specific scene to be composed of 1) color images with 6-DOF poses; 2) dense depth maps for each image and 3) a complete point cloud map. We then propose an efficient end-to-end solution to generating and evaluating AR Maps. Firstly, for efficient data capture, a backpack scanning device is presented with a unified calibration pipeline. Secondly, we propose an AR mapping pipeline which takes the input from the scanning device and produces accurate AR Maps. Finally, we present an approach to evaluating the accuracy of AR Maps with the help of the highly accurate reconstruction result from a high-end laser scanner. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to present an end-to-end solution to efficient and accurate mapping for AR applications.

Kejie Qiu, Shenzhou Chen, Jiahui Zhang et al.

Accurate localization is fundamental to a variety of applications, such as navigation, robotics, autonomous driving, and Augmented Reality (AR). Different from incremental localization, global localization has no drift caused by error accumulation, which is desired in many application scenarios. In addition to GPS used in the open air, 3D maps are also widely used as alternative global localization references. In this paper, we propose a compact 3D map-based global localization system using a low-cost monocular camera and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). The proposed compact map consists of two types of simplified elements with multiple semantic labels, which is well adaptive to various man-made environments like urban environments. Also, semantic edge features are used for the key image-map registration, which is robust against occlusion and long-term appearance changes in the environments. To further improve the localization performance, the key semantic edge alignment is formulated as an optimization problem based on initial poses predicted by an independent VIO (Visual-Inertial Odometry) module. The localization system is realized with modular design in real time. We evaluate the localization accuracy through real-world experimental results compared with ground truth, long-term localization performance is also demonstrated.