A mobile markerless AR system for maintenance and repair

Abstract

We present a solution for AR based repair guidance. This solution covers software as well as hardware related issues. In particular we developed a markerless CAD based tracking system which can deal with different illumination conditions during the tracking stage, partial occlusions and rapid motion. The system is also able to automatically recover from occasional tracking failures. On the hardware side the system is based on an off the shelf notebook, a wireless mobile setup consisting of a wide-angle video camera and an analog video transmission system. This setup has been tested with a monocular full-color video-see-through HMD and additionally with a monochrome optical-see-through HMD. Our system underwent several extensive test series under real industrial conditions and proved to be useful for different maintenance and repair scenarios.