Spatial Augmented Reality for Environmentally-Lit Real-World Objects

One augmented reality approach is to use digital projectors to alter the appearance of a physical scene, avoiding the need for head-mounted displays or special goggles. Instead, spatial augmented reality (SAR) systems depend on having sufficient light radiance to compensate the surface's colors to those of a target visualization. However, standard SAR systems in dark room settings may suffer from insufficient light radiance causing bright colors to exhibit unexpected color shifts, resulting in a misleading visualization. We introduce a SAR framework which focuses on minimally altering the appearance of arbitrarily shaped and colored objects to exploit the presence of environment/room light as an additional light source to achieve compliancy for bright colors. While previous approaches have compensated for environment light, none have explicitly exploited the environment light to achieve bright, previously incompliant colors. We implement a full working system and compared our results to solutions achievable with standard SAR systems.