A marker-based augmented reality system for mobile devices

Given the rate at which mobile devices are adopted by the general public, we are at a point where many of us own a smart phone. Currently, this makes them the most affordable interfaces for augmented reality. However, with respect to augmented reality, smartphones present some limitations: location tracking is, on a large scale, supported only for outdoor environments and the content types that can be displayed to the user are generally limited. We therefore propose a marker-based tracking system which detects QR-codes on the camera capture and overlays rich media obtained from a server. We further analyze the performance implications of such a system, by breaking down the processing into pipelined stages and providing a mechanism of skipping frames from the capture in order to give a fast on-screen response.