Mobile Augmented Reality: Applications and Spe-cific Technical Issues

Although human’s sedentary nature over time, his wish to travel the world remains as strong as ever. This paper discusses how imagery and Augmented Reality (AR) techniques can be of great help not only when discovering a new urban environment but also when observing the evolution of the natural environment. The study is applied on Smartphone which is currently our most familiar device. Smart phone is utilized in our daily lives because it is low weight, ease of communications, and other valuable applications. In this chapter, we discuss technical issues of augmented reality especially with building recognition. Our building recognition method is based on an efficient hybrid approach, which combines the potentials of Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) features points and lines. Our method relies on Approximate Nearest Neighbors Search approach (ANNS). Although ANNS approaches are high speed, they are less accurate than linear algorithms. To assure an optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy, the proposed method performs a filtering step on the top of the ANNS. Finally, our method calls Hausdorff measure [15] with line models.