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Semantic-aware label placement for augmented reality in street view

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Abstract

In an augmented reality (AR) application, placing labels in a manner that is clear and readable without occluding the critical information from the real world can be a challenging problem. This paper introduces a label placement technique for AR used in street view scenarios. We propose a semantic-aware task-specific label placement method by identifying potentially important image regions through a novel feature map, which we refer to as guidance map. Given an input image, its saliency information, semantic information and the task-specific importance prior are integrated in the guidance map for our labeling task. To learn the task prior, we created a label placement dataset with the users’ labeling preferences, as well as use it for evaluation. Our solution encodes the constraints for placing labels in an optimization problem to obtain the final label layout, and the labels will be placed in appropriate positions to reduce the chances of overlaying important real-world objects in street view AR scenarios. The experimental validation shows clearly the benefits of our method over previous solutions in the AR street view navigation and similar applications.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61802109 and 61902109.

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Correspondence to Wei Guo or Haibin Ling.

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Jianqing Jia has visited Haibin Ling’s Group in Temple University during October 12, 2018 to May 20, 2019. Semir Elezovikj declares he has no conflict of interest. Heng Fan declares he has no conflict of interest. Shuojin Yang declares he has no conflict of interest. Jing Liu declares he has no conflict of interest. Wei Guo declares she has no conflict of interest. Chiu C. Tan declares he has no conflict of interest. Haibin Ling serves as associate editors for IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Pattern Recognition (PR) and Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU).

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Jia, J., Elezovikj, S., Fan, H. et al. Semantic-aware label placement for augmented reality in street view. Vis Comput 37, 1805–1819 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-020-01939-w

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