Interactive Museum Guide: Accurate Retrieval of Object Descriptions

In this paper we describe an interactive guide that is able to automatically retrieve information about objects on display in museums. A visitor can point this mobile device at exhibits and automatically retrieve descriptions about objects of interest in a non-distractive way. We investigate Gaussian image intensity attenuation and a foveation-based preprocessing approach which both allow to focus interest point extraction towards the center of an image. Furthermore, we describe a postprocessing strategy that allows to improve object recognition rates by suppressing multiple matches. The proposed interactive museum guide achieves object recognition via image matching and thus allows the use of model sets that do not need to be segmented.