Obstacle Detection and Alert System for Smartphone AR Users

This paper presents an obstacle detection and alert system for the pedestrians who use smartphone AR applications. The system analyzes the input camera image to extract feature points and determines whether the feature points come from obstacles ahead in the path. With the obstacle detector, two experiments were made. The first investigated the obstacle alert interfaces, and the second investigated the orientation guide interfaces that instruct users to hold their smartphones with some angles/orientations appropriate to capture the environment. Then, the best interfaces identified from the experiments were integrated and tested to examine their usability and user experiences.