In anticipation of the proliferation of micro-projectors on our handheld imaging devices, we designed and tested a camera-projector system that allows a distant user to point into a remote 3D environment with a projector. The solution involves a means for locating a projected dot, and for adjusting its location to correspond to a position indicted a remote user viewing the scene through a camera. It was designed to operate efficiently, even in the presence of camera noise. While many camera-projector display systems require a calibration phase, the presented approach allows calibration-free operation. The tracking algorithm is implemented with a modified 2D gradient decent method that performs even in the presence of spatial discontinuities. Our prototype was constructed using a standard web-camera and network to perform real-time tracking, navigating the projected dot across irregularly shaped and colored surfaces accurately. Our tests included a camera-projector system and client on either side of the Atlantic Ocean with no loss of responsiveness.

Date Published: 27 January 2010
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 7542, Multimedia on Mobile Devices 2010, 75420I (27 January 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.838640

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7542:
Multimedia on Mobile Devices 2010
Reiner Creutzburg; David Akopian, Editor(s)