Markerless Vision-Based Augmented Reality for Urban Planning

Augmented Reality (AR) is a rapidly developing field with numerous potential applications. For example, building developers, public authorities, and other construction industry stakeholders need to visually assess potential new developments with regard to aesthetics, health and safety, and other criteria. Current state-of-the-art visualization technologies are mainly fully virtual, while AR has the potential to enhance those visualizations by observing proposed designs directly within the real environment. A novel AR system is presented, that is most appropriate for urban applications. It is based on monocular vision, is markerless, and does not rely on beacon-based localization technologies (like GPS) or inertial sensors. Additionally, the system automatically calculates occlusions of the built environment on the augmenting virtual objects. Three datasets from real environments presenting different levels of complexity (geometrical complexity, textures, occlusions) are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system. Videos augmented with our system are shown to provide realistic and valuable visualizations of proposed changes of the urban environment. Limitations are also discussed with suggestions for future work.