Augmented Reality for Green Consumption: Using Computer Vision to Inform the Consumers at Time of Purchase

Augmented-reality (AR) interfaces are receiving growing attention due to their versatility and usefulness in numerous application areas. In this paper, we tackle the problem of environmental awareness in consumers at the time of purchase: we design, implement, and evaluate a novel interface for overlaying product ecological information in the consumer's field of vision. The identification of the product is done by computer-vision techniques that detect logotypes of brands as well as ecological labels (such as recycling symbols) when the user holds a product package. The recognition is performed with feature-detection algorithms. We evaluate the interface in terms of computational load for image processing and usability, reporting favorable results in terms of computation time, effect on the ecological consciousness of the users, and the usability.