Real-Time Video Annotations for Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) provides an intuitive user interface to present information in the context of the real world. A common application is to overlay screen-aligned annotations for real world objects to create in-situ information displays for users. While the referenced object’s location is fixed in the view the annotating labels should be placed in such a way as to not interfere with other content of interest such as other labels or objects in the real world. We present a new approach to determine and track areas with less visual interest based on feature density and to automatically compute label layout from this information. The algorithm works in under 5ms per frame, which is fast enough that it can be used with existing AR systems. Moreover, it provides flexible constraints for controlling label placement behaviour to the application designer. The resulting overlays are demonstrated with a simple hand-held augmented reality system for information display in a lab environment.