David Roberts, Alberico Menozzi, James Cook, Todd Sherrill, Stephen Snarski, Pat Russler, Brian Clipp, Robert Karl, Eric Wenger, Matthew Bennett, Jennifer Mauger, William Church, Herman Towles, Stephen MacCabe, Jeffrey Webb, Jasper Lupo, Jan-Michael Frahm, Enrique Dunn, Christopher Leslie, Greg Welch
This paper describes performance evaluation of a wearable augmented reality system for natural outdoor environments.
Applied Research Associates (ARA), as prime integrator on the DARPA ULTRA-Vis (Urban Leader Tactical,
Response, Awareness, and Visualization) program, is developing a soldier-worn system to provide intuitive ‘heads-up’
visualization of tactically-relevant geo-registered icons. Our system combines a novel pose estimation capability, a
helmet-mounted see-through display, and a wearable processing unit to accurately overlay geo-registered iconography
(e.g., navigation waypoints, sensor points of interest, blue forces, aircraft) on the soldier’s view of reality. We achieve
accurate pose estimation through fusion of inertial, magnetic, GPS, terrain data, and computer-vision inputs. We
leverage a helmet-mounted camera and custom computer vision algorithms to provide terrain-based measurements of
absolute orientation (i.e., orientation of the helmet with respect to the earth). These orientation measurements, which
leverage mountainous terrain horizon geometry and mission planning landmarks, enable our system to operate robustly
in the presence of external and body-worn magnetic disturbances. Current field testing activities across a variety of
mountainous environments indicate that we can achieve high icon geo-registration accuracy (<10mrad) using these
vision-based methods.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.