Alignment-free offline calibration of commercial optical see-through head-mounted displays with simplified procedures
File(s)09291377.pdf (2.1 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Hu, Xue
Rodriguez y Baena, Ferdinando
Cutolo, Fabrizio
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Despite the growing availability of self-contained augmented reality head-mounted displays (AR HMDs) based on optical see-through (OST) technology, their potential applications across highly challenging medical and industrial settings are still hampered by the complexity of the display calibration required to ensure the locational coherence between the real and virtual elements. The calibration of commercial OST displays remains an open challenge due to the inaccessibility of the user’s perspective and the limited hardware information available to the end-user. State-of-the-art calibrations usually comprise both offline and online stages. The offline calibration at a generic viewpoint provides a starting point for the subsequent refinements and it is crucial. Current offline calibration methods either heavily rely on the user-alignment or require complicated hardware calibrations, making the overall procedure subjective and/or tedious. To address this problem, in this work we propose two fully alignment-free calibration methods with less complicated hardware calibration procedures compared with state-of-the-art solutions. The first method employs an eye-replacement camera to compute the rendering camera’s projection matrix based on photogrammetry techniques. The second method controls the rendered object position in a tracked 3D space to compensate for the parallax-related misalignment for a generic viewpoint. Both methods have been tested on Microsoft HoloLens 1. Quantitative results show that the average overlay misalignment is fewer than 4 pixels (around 1.5 mm or 9 arcmin) when the target stays within arm’s reach. The achieved misalignment is much lower than the HoloLens default interpupillary distance (IPD)-based correction, and equivalent but with lower variance than the Single Point Active Alignment Method (SPAAM)-based calibration. The two proposed methods offer strengths in complementary aspects and can be chosen according to the user’s needs. We also provide several update schemes for the two methods that can be integrated for an on-line viewpoint-dependent refinement of the calibration parameters. Both methods have been integrated into a Unity3D-based framework and can be directly applied to Unity-assisted devices.
Date Issued
2020-12-11
Date Acceptance
2020-12-08
Citation
IEEE Access, 2020, 8, pp.223661-223674
ISSN
2169-3536
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
223661
End Page
223674
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Access
Volume
8
Copyright Statement
© 2020 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
License URL
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9291377
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Information Systems
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Telecommunications
Computer Science
Engineering
Calibration
Cameras
Three-dimensional displays
Hardware
Transmission line matrix methods
Rendering (computer graphics)
Two dimensional displays
Augmented reality
display-relative calibration
OST-HMD calibration
REALITY
08 Information and Computing Sciences
09 Engineering
10 Technology
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2020-12-11