Semi-parametric color reproduction method for optical see-through head-mounted displays

IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2015 Nov;21(11):1269-1278. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2459892.

Abstract

The fundamental issues in Augmented Reality (AR) are on how to naturally mediate the reality with virtual content as seen by users. In AR applications with Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays (OST-HMD), the issues often raise the problem of rendering color on the OST-HMD consistently to input colors. However, due to various display constraints and eye properties, it is still a challenging task to indistinguishably reproduce the colors on OST-HMDs. An approach to solve this problem is to pre-process the input color so that a user perceives the output color on the display to be the same as the input. We propose a color calibration method for OST-HMDs. We start from modeling the physical optics in the rendering and perception process between the HMD and the eye. We treat the color distortion as a semi-parametric model which separates the non-linear color distortion and the linear color shift. We demonstrate that calibrated images regain their original appearance on two OST-HMD setups with both synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the limitations of the proposed method and remaining problems of the color reproduction in OST-HMDs. We then discuss how to realize more practical color reproduction methods for future HMD-eye system.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Color
  • Computer Graphics*
  • Equipment Design
  • Head / physiology
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation*
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • User-Computer Interface*
  • Video Recording