Design of a Cost Effective Spatial Image Registration System for Augmented Reality in Vehicular Applications

The paper describes the design and validation of a spatial image registration algorithm for a vehicular Head-Mounted Augmented Reality (AR) system. AR can considerably improve the driving experience by increasing the driver’s situational awareness. AR can only work if stable and realistic holograms are generated. The process of generating the holograms so that they appear in a specific position in the world is also known as image registration. Since AR devices employ see-through Head-Mounted Displays, realistic image registration requires high-accuracy head tracking. Solutions exist in static environments where state-of-the-art simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms suffice. Vehicles are more challenging. In aerospace, costly optical-inertial tracking systems are regularly employed. This paper focuses instead on low-cost ground vehicles and proposes a solution that does not require aerospace-grade Inertial Measurement Units and is easily integrable on cars. The proposed solution, tested on a racing circuit, is based on passive markers and on the stereoscopic detection of the road plane on which the AR features are anchored.