Imperceptible Patterns for Reliable Acquisition of Mixed Reality Environments

Projection-based mixed and augmented reality settings often require concurrent optical camera acquisition. Unfortunately, the grabbed images frequently capture the projected imagery in addition to the desired scenery, introducing undesired interference and complicating image analysis. To efficiently improve signal-to-noise ratio, we present a method allowing the acquisition to take place under controlled illumination conditions. By exploiting the micro-mirror modulation pattern used by Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors, a pixel-level control of light can be achieved. Since the patterns are imperceptible to the human eye and only slightly degrade the projected images, structured light techniques are introduced into humaninhabited mixed and augmented reality environments, where they often were too intrusive previously. This extended abstract gives an overview of the proposed embedding and illustrates feasibility and usefulness of the approach with representative example applications.