Differentiated Handling of Physical Scenes and Virtual Objects for Mobile Augmented Reality

Mobile devices running augmented reality applications consume considerable energy for graphics-intensive workloads. This paper presents a scheme for the differentiated handling of camera-captured physical scenes and computer-generated virtual objects according to different perceptual quality metrics. We propose online algorithms and their real-time implementations to reduce energy consumption through dynamic frame rate adaptation while maintaining the visual quality required for augmented reality applications. To evaluate system efficacy, we integrate our scheme into Android and conduct extensive experiments on a commercial smartphone with various application scenarios. The results show that the proposed scheme can achieve energy savings of up to 39.1% in comparison to the native graphics system in Android while maintaining satisfactory visual quality.