Let the sunshine on your screen: introducing augmented reality into interactive television

The paper discusses the integration of augmented reality techniques into interactive television (ITV) and presents a new method for ensuring photometric realism. ITV services known today are email and World Wide Web (WWW) access. This article focuses on a future option for interactive television: the integration of games and virtual 3D scenes. For example, while watching football, you may be invited by a joint WWW commercial to have a look at a virtual 3D model of a sporting shoe. Displaying the sporting shoe on the screen in front of the football scene is in fact a case of augmented reality. The paper proposes a fast and simple method to extract a number of light sources from the football video that ensure a dynamic illumination of the virtual object depending on the content of the TV screen. The method works for all kinds of video content since only the light source intensities are estimated from the video signal while the light source positions are set by a fixed rule.