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Virtual content instability caused by device pose tracking error remains a prevalent issue in markerless augmented reality (AR), especially on smartphones and tablets. However, when examining environments which will host AR experiences, it is challenging to determine where those instability artifacts will occur; we rarely have access to ground truth pose to measure pose error, and even if pose error is available, traditional visualizations do not connect that data with the real environment, limiting their usefulness. To address these issues we present SiTAR (Situated Trajectory Analysis for Augmented Reality), the first situated trajectory analysis system for AR that incorporates estimates of pose tracking error. We start by developing the first uncertainty-based pose error estimation method for visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI-SLAM), which allows us to obtain pose error estimates without ground truth; we achieve an average accuracy of up to 96.1% and an average FI score of up to 0.77 in our evaluations on four VI-SLAM datasets. Next, we present our SiTAR system, implemented for ARCore devices, combining a backend that supplies uncertainty-based pose error estimates with a frontend that generates situated trajectory visualizations. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy of SiTAR in realistic conditions by testing three visualization techniques in an in-the-wild study with 15 users and 13 diverse environments; this study reveals the impact both environment scale and the properties of surfaces present can have on user experience and task performance.
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SEESys: Online Pose Error Estimation System for Visual SLAM
In this work, we introduce SEESys, the first system to provide online pose error estimation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Unlike prior offline error estimation approaches, the SEESys framework efficiently collects real-time system features and delivers accurate pose error magnitude estimates with low latency. This enables real-time quality-of-service information for downstream applications. To achieve this goal, we develop a SLAM system run-time status monitor (RTS monitor) that performs feature collection with minimal overhead, along with a multi-modality attention-based Deep SLAM Error Estimator (DeepSEE) for error estimation. We train and evaluate SEESys using both public SLAM benchmarks and a diverse set of synthetic datasets, achieving an RMSE of 0.235 cm of pose error estimation, which is 15.8% lower than the baseline. Additionally, we conduct a case study showcasing SEESys in a real-world scenario, where it is applied to a real-time audio error advisory system for human operators of a SLAM-enabled device. The results demonstrate that SEESys provides error estimates with an average end-to-end latency of 37.3 ms, and the audio error advisory reduces pose tracking error by 25%.
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- PAR ID:
- 10554272
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM SenSys 2024
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- SLAM, pose tracking, tracking error, error estimate, edge computing, deep learning
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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