Augmented Reality-based Visiting Guidance in Indoor Artistic Statue Exhibitions by Use of Mobile Devices

An augmented reality (AR)-based guidance system for use in indoor artistic-statue exhibitions is proposed to guide a visitor to find and appreciate statue artworks. For statue recognition, a skillful method of exhaustive matching of statue-image features is proposed, which “learns” each statue by capturing its images from different directions to construct a database, and recognizing each statue by matching its image against the database via the use of speeded-up robust features (SURFs). To improve the matching accuracy, a method of using two nearest neighbors of each matched feature point and a technique of utilizing parallel-line structure in matching feature-point pairs are proposed. For visitor positioning, a method of recognizing a nearby statue and taking the statue position as the visitor location is proposed. To guide the visitor, a method of augmenting a guidance arrow on the visitor’s smart phone and updating the arrow dynamically based on the location of the visitor-selected destination statue and the reading of the digital compass of the visitor’s smart phone is proposed. Good experimental results showing the feasibility of the proposed system are also included.