Affine object representations for calibration-free augmented reality

We describe the design and implementation of a video based augmented reality system capable of overlaying three dimensional graphical objects on live video of dynamic environments. The key feature of the system is that it is completely uncalibrated: it does not use any metric information about the calibration parameters of the camera or the 3D locations and dimensions of the environment's objects. The only requirement is the ability to track across frames at least four feature points that are specified by the user at system initialization time and whose world coordinates are unknown. Our approach is based on the following observation: given a set of four or more non coplanar 3D points, the projection of all points in the set can be computed as a linear combination of the projections of just four of the points. We exploit this observation by: tracking lines and fiducial points at frame rate; and representing virtual objects in a non Euclidean, affine frame of reference that allows their projection to be computed as a linear combination of the projection of the fiducial points.