Markerless Image-based 3D Tracking for Real-time Augmented Reality Applications

In this contribution we describe a visual marker-less realtime tracking system for Augmented Reality applications. The system uses a fisheye lens mounted on a firewire camera with 10 fps for visual tracking of 3D scene points without any prior scene knowledge. All visual-geometric data is acquired online during the tracking using a structure-frommotion approach. 2D Image features in the hemispherical fisheye image are tracked using a 2D feature point tracker. Tracking may be facilitated by orientation compensation with an inertial sensor. Based on the image tracks, 3D camera egomotion and 3D features are estimated online from the image sequence. The tracking is robust even in the presence of moving objects as the large field of view of the camera stabilizes the tracking.