Importance masks for revealing occluded objects in augmented reality
Erick Méndez, Dieter Schmalstieg · 2009
Figure 1: Example of our technique. Notice how there is enough information of the occluder preserved even though it has little initial structure. Furthermore, the preserved information helps conveying spatial arrangements between virtual and real objects. When simulating ”X-ray vision ” in Augmented Reality, a critical aspect is ensuring correct perception of the occluded objects posi-tion. Naı̈ve overlay rendering of occluded objects on top of real-world occluders can lead to a misunderstanding of the visual scene and a poor perception of the depth. We present a simple technique to enhance the perception of the spatial arrangements in the scene. An importance mask associated with occluders informs the render-ing what information can be overlaid and what should be preserved. This technique is independent of scene properties such as illumina-tion and surface properties, which may be unknown. The proposed solution is computed efficiently in a single-pass fragment shaders on the GPU.