Augmented Reality on the iPhone

My final year Masters project or Master’s Thesis was in the realm of Augmented Reality. The advent of touch screen capable phones has unlocked the potential for Augmented Reality en masse.
The goal was to develop and demonstrate the viability of Augmented Reality on a state of the art mobile device, the iPhone. This was achieved with the combination of server side recognition and local natural feature based tracking. Image recognition services from kooaba, ETH and an OCR service powered by Tesseract OCR enabled the project to recognise DVD covers, games, books, buildings, scenes and text. Any identified objects were tracked to compensate for drift caused by movements and lag in server/device interactions. Videos of the prototype in action can be found here and here. There is also an interesting article posted on kooaba’s blog regarding the program which can be accessed here.

Image Processing on a Mobile Phone

This was my third year Masters group project at Imperial College, where we were demonstrating the capabilities of mobile phones to perform real-time image processing.We got some pretty impressive results with several different image processing filters, choices, options and display modes. Most Symbian S60 mobile phones should be able to run our application, but keep in mind our results came from the Nokia N95 phone. If you have a Symbian S60 phone you can install our application and test it for yourself, the menu system is pretty straightforward and shouldn’t cause too much grief.
You will need three files to run the application:
CameraApp.sisx, openc_glib.SIS and openc_ssl.SIS
The sisx file contains our program and the two SIS files contains the Open C library files required by our program. Install these three files on your phone and you should have a program in your applications folder called “CAV” (Computer Assisted Vision).