AR Workspace Content Segmentation for Echo-Free Collaboration
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Solution Overview
Problem
In augmented reality (AR) collaboration environments, existing technologies face challenges in efficiently differentiating between foreground and background content, leading to undesirable echoing effects and increased data volume, which negatively impact real-time performance.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that calibrate AR workspaces by creating camera-to-shared and shared-to-projector transformations, allowing for the generation and projection of remote composite images while eliminating background content through masking, ensuring only local foreground content is shared between collaborating workspaces.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If all content (foreground and background) is transmitted between AR workspaces, then complete visual information is shared, but data transmission volume increases and visual echoes occur
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the AR workspace content into foreground content (local objects and annotations) and background content (projected virtual objects). By separating these components, the system transmits only foreground content between workspaces, reducing data volume while maintaining visual information completeness for collaboration.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and removes background content (projected virtual objects) from the transmitted data stream. The camera captures the full scene including projections, but the system identifies and excludes these projected elements from transmission to remote workspaces, preventing visual echoes and reducing unnecessary data transmission.
2Device complexity
If foreground and background content are not differentiated, then processing is simpler, but visual echoes occur and collaboration quality deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different processing qualities to different content types. Foreground content (local objects, user annotations) receives full processing and transmission priority, while background content (projected virtual objects) is identified and excluded. This differential processing approach improves collaboration quality by ensuring local content is accurately shared while preventing echo effects from projected content.
3Manufacturing precision
If high resolution AR content is processed and transmitted, then visual quality is improved, but computational cost increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the necessary foreground content from the full AR scene at high resolution, excluding background projections. This selective extraction maintains visual quality for local content that requires high fidelity collaboration while reducing the overall computational burden of processing and transmitting complete high-resolution scenes.
Data Source
AI summary
An image processing method, for collaborating between a first augmented reality (AR) workspace and a second AR workspace, includes: calibrating the first AR workspace by creating a camera-to-shared space transformation between a camera coordinate space and a shared coordinate space, and a shared space-to-projector transformation between the shared coordinate space and a projector coordinate space; obtaining a remote composite image of a foreground content in the second AR workspace; generating a projector image by applying the shared space-to-projector transformation to the remote composite image; projecting the projector image into the first AR workspace; obtaining an input image of the first AR workspace that includes the projector image and a foreground content of the first AR workspace; generating an output image by applying the camera-to-shared space transformation to the input image; and obtaining a remote mask based on the remote composite image.