Markerless Vision‐Based Augmented Reality for Urban Planning

Augmented Reality (AR) is a rapidly develop- ing field with numerous potential applications. For ex- ample, building developers, public authorities, and other construction industry stakeholders need to visually as- sess potential new developments with regard to aesthet- ics, 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 visualiza- tions 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 local- ization technologies (like GPS) or inertial sensors. Addi- tionally, the system automatically calculates occlusions of the built environment on the augmenting virtual objects. Three datasets from real environments presenting dif- ferent levels of complexity (geometrical complexity, tex- tures, occlusions) are used to demonstrate the perfor- mance of the proposed system. Videos augmented with our system are shown to provide realistic and valuable visualizations of proposed changes of the urban environ- ∗ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: f.n.bosche@