Apple continues to beef up its plans for augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) products. The tech giant has been granted a patent (number 20180268237) for a “method and system for determining at least one property related to at least part of a real environment.” The goal to improve the capturing of moving objects in real life for use in an AR/VR scene.
In the patent, Apple notes that computer vision methods that involve analysis of images are often used, for example, in navigation, object recognition, 3D reconstruction, camera pose estimation, and AR applications, to name a few. However, whenever a camera pose estimation, object recognition, object tracking,
Simultaneous Localization and Tracking (SLAM) or Structure-from-Motion (SfM) algorithm is used in dynamic environments where at least one real object is moving, the accuracy of the algorithm is often reduced significantly with frequent tracking failures, despite robust optimization techniques employed in the actual algorithms.
This is because various such computer vision algorithms assume a static environment and that the only moving object in the scene is the camera itself. Apple wants to “effectively improve the robustness and accuracy of computer vision algorithms.”
Of course, Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product.
