PROJECTS:
MATRIS - Markerless real-time Tracking for Augmented Reality Image Synthesis

MATRIS was an EU-funded IST project under Framework 6, which ran for three years from February 2004, and was led by Fraunhofer IGD, Germany.  Its objective was to develop and implement a system for determining the position, orientation, and focal length of a camera in real time, by analysis of the camera images and exploitation of unobtrusive inertial motion sensors.

By not requiring markers or other special infrastructure in the environment, the system was designed to be suitable for applications where existing tracking systems cannot easily be used, including the insertion of virtual objects in live broadcast images outside of a dedicated "virtual studio" environment, such as graphics for sport, or virtual objects in a conventional TV studio.

As a part of our contribution to the project, we developed a method of tracking camera movement in sports scenes using the lines on the pitch, which was presented at CVMP2006.  This has been licensed to Red Bee Media for use in the Piero sports graphics system and to RT Software Ltd for use in their Tog Sports system.  We also worked with the project partners on other aspects of the system, and looked at how it could be applied in a broadcast environment.  We presented an overview of the MATRIS project at IBC2006, and demonstrated it on the New Technology Campus.  The project was summarised in a handout produced for this demonstration.

More details can be found on the project website at www.ist-matris.org, and in  the Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, Volume 2, Numbers 2-3, November, 2007: Special Issue on Markerless Real-Time Tracking for Augmented Reality Image Synthesis.