AR Video Overlay Using Contextual Metadata for Obscured Landmarks
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Solution Overview
Problem
Drones and other aerial vehicles capture video images of geographic areas that are often blurry, have poor resolution, or are obscured by cloud cover, making it difficult to discern landmarks and features.
Innovation Solution
A computing system obtains a video stream of a geographic area, inserts contextual metadata, such as historical information, into the video frames based on the field-of-view of the camera, allowing for the overlay of relevant information like building names or identifiers, enhancing visibility through augmented reality.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If drones capture video images of geographic areas, then video coverage is achieved, but the images are blurry, have poor resolution, and are obscured by cloud cover
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces contextual metadata as an intermediary layer that mediates between the poor-quality video images and the user's need for clear information. The metadata, retrieved from external data sources based on geographic coordinates, serves as a mediator that provides clear textual information about landmarks and features without requiring the video images themselves to be clear.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a parallel information channel by copying geographic coordinate data from the video stream metadata and using it to retrieve contextual information from external databases. This copied coordinate data serves as a key to access pre-existing, high-quality information about the geographic area, bypassing the need for high-quality visual capture.
2Loss of information
If contextual metadata is overlaid on video frames, then feature identification is improved, but information processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary actions by extracting geographic coordinate metadata from the video stream in advance and using these coordinates to pre-fetch contextual information from external databases before the video is fully processed or viewed. This preliminary metadata extraction and information retrieval simplifies the real-time processing requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the mechanical/physical system of capturing clear visual images with a computational system that processes metadata coordinates and retrieves information from databases. Instead of relying on optical quality, the system substitutes a computational information retrieval mechanism that queries external sources using geographic coordinates derived from the video stream.
Data Source
AI summary
In some embodiments, a method comprises obtaining a video stream of a portion of a geographic area, the video stream comprising a plurality of video frames, each of the plurality of video frames captured at a respective first time. Contextual metadata is obtained, the contextual metadata associated with one or more objects located in the portion of the geographic area at a second time, the second time being before each of the respective first times. The contextual metadata is inserted into one or more of the plurality of video frames, thereby causing the contextual metadata associated with the one or more objects to be overlaid on one or more corresponding portions of the one or more of the plurality of video frames.