DISPLAY REGISTRATION FOR DEVICE INTERACTION
A Proof of Principle Prototype
Nick Pears
Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK
Patrick Olivier and Dan Jackson
Culture Lab, King’s Walk, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE7 1NP, UK
Keywords:
Human-Computer Interaction, Image Registration, Real-Time Vision.
Abstract:
A method is proposed to facilitate visually-driven interactions between two devices, which we call the client,
such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA), which must be equipped with a camera, and the
server, such as a personal computer (PC) or intelligent display. The technique that we describe here requires
a camera on the client to view the display on the server, such that either the client or the server (or both) can
compute exactly which part of the server display is being viewed. The server display and the clients image
of the server display, which can be written onto (part of) the client’s display are then registered. This basic
principle, which we call “display registration” supports a very broad range of interactions (depending on the
context in which the system is operating) and it will make these interactions significantly quicker, easier and
more intuitive for the user to initiate and control. In addition, either the client or the server (or both) can
compute the six degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) position of the client camera with respect to the server display.
We have built a prototype which proves the principle and usefulness of display registration. This system
employs markers on the server display for fast registration and it has been used to demonstrate a variety of
operations, such as selecting and zooming into images.
1 INTRODUCTION
The last decade has seen an explosion in mobile com-
munications, evidenced by the enormous take up of
mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs)
or hand-heldcomputers. More recently there has been
a drive to integrate the many devices that might ex-
ist in our environment through the use of person-
nel area network (PANs) using technology such as
Bluetooth and infrared networking. Easy integration
means that a network connection can be established
between, for example, a PDA and the desktop com-
puter, and thus information can be exchanged be-
tween the two. Whilst Bluetooth connectivity is in-
deed easy for a user to establish, users are required to
use an additional application on the PDA (for exam-
ple file browser) to access the contents of the desktop
computer, and vice versa. Figure 1 illustrates the case
of downloading a folder on the desktop to a PDA us-
ing specialist software on the PDA. Here the handset
and the desktop are used as separate computers, just
as we might remotely access one desktop computer
from another.
Figure 1: Transfer using separate application.
This physical separation of handset and desktop,
and the incumbent complexity for users in trying to
connect between the two, is the problem addressed
by this paper. Our vision is of a technology whereby
the display of the handset could be treated as an al-
446
Pears N., Olivier P. and Jackson D. (2008).
DISPLAY REGISTRATION FOR DEVICE INTERACTION - A Proof of Principle Prototype.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, pages 446-451
DOI: 10.5220/0001075104460451
Copyright
c
SciTePress
Figure 2: Transfer using display registration.
most indistinguishable part of the display of the desk-
top computer. For example, by holding the handset
over the desktop’s display, the content of the desktop
screen below the handset appears on a region of the
handset’s display. Figure 2 illustrates the concept; a
user holds the handset, equipped with rear-mounted
camera, over the desktop. In doing so the user can
see, on the handset, the contents of the display below
it, and manipulate elements of this display as if they
were elements of the handset’s display itself. This
functionality offers a wide range of applications, for
example:
(i) Data exchange between client and server (data
push/pull). Suppose that the user uses the client dis-
play to observe an icon of a file displayed on the
server system. Suppose that the user then clicks on
the image of this file icon using a button (or stylus)
click on the the client device. Since the position of
this click on the client display can be converted to the
corresponding position on the server display, which
is passed to the server over the data communication
channel (eg bluetooth), the server system can deter-
mine what file is being requested as it knows what has
been “virtually clicked” on the server display. Then it
can send the file data across the communication chan-
nel to be stored on the client system. In this way data
can easily be pulled from the server to the client de-
vice, or pushed from client to server.
(ii) Semantic magic-lens interaction. In an imple-
mentation of a semantic lens, the action that the user
requests is inferred from what the user is pointing at.
As an example, there may be a map of the UK on the
server display. By pointing the client camera at a par-
ticular town (York, for example), the application may
infer that all contacts from an address book database
that have the keyword “York” in the city field of the
address book are copied across to the client address
book.
(iii) Using 6 DOF client pose to mediate inter-
action. It is possible to mediate interactions by us-
ing the client device in the role of a 2D and/or 3D
mouse. Given that the display registration has been
computed, the six degree of freedom pose of the client
can be computed, if the camera/display screen param-
eters (such as aspect ratio) are also known through de-
vice specification or a standard calibration procedure.
The operation of a 2D mouse, for example, is straight-
forward: given that the two displays are registered,
the centre of the client display can be highlighted us-
ing cross-hairs, on the server display and thereby act
as a mouse pointing device. Selection of a file could
consist of pointing at a file icon and then ‘peeling it
off’ using a rotation of the hand. This rotation can be
detected on the client device and interpreted as a re-
quest to pull a copy of the file off the server system
and store it on the client system.
Such a technology has a number of possibili-
ties for intelligent public information displays, with
which users might pull and push information simply
using their PDAs or mobile phones, thereby opening
up a host of new commercial opportunities both for
handset vendors, retailers and service providers. Ex-
amples include retrieving the details of property for
sale in a estate-agent window, or purchase of cinema
tickets from an intelligent display.
The immediate realisation of these applications re-
quires one particular innovation: that the position of
the handset (PDAor mobile phone) can be tracked rel-
ative to the screen of the desktop display (or the dis-
play of any computer). We call this problem display
registration, and the notion of registering one display
with another, in this manner, is the core of the techni-
cal work required to realise our novel concept.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The
following section describes fully the concept of dis-
play registration. Section 3 describes the the two main
categories of display registration, namely marker-
based and markerless. Section 4 describes the pro-
totype marker-based system that we have built, while
the following section describes our first evaluation of
that system. A final section is used for conclusions
and suggestions for further work.
2 DISPLAY REGISTRATION
The work described here relates to the interaction of a
pair of devices, which can communicate data across
a communication channel (typically wireless, such
as wifi or bluetooth), where one of these devices is
DISPLAY REGISTRATION FOR DEVICE INTERACTION - A Proof of Principle Prototype
447
equipped with or linked to an imaging device, such as
a camera, which is able to view the other device’s dis-
play, such that the camera’s image is registered with
that display. The term registered means that for any
(pixel) position in the viewed display we know its cor-
responding position in the captured image of the dis-
play. We call the concept of a display with a registered
image of that display display registration, as this is an
instance of image registration. The captured image of
the display, which is registered to the display itself,
can be passed to the display on the camera-equipped
device for the system operator to use in his/her cur-
rent task. In most applications, the camera equipped
device will be smaller and manoeuvrable by hand. We
call this the client device and movements and button
(or stylus) clicks of this device control the way in
which the system operates, within a certain context.
The other device, will, in general, be a larger static
device and we will call this the server device.
2.1 Device Interaction via Registered
Display Operations
In typical use of this method, the mobile client de-
vice is moved around by the user, whilst maintaining
at least a small part of the server display in it’s field of
view. Throughout this motion, the client camera im-
age and hence the client’s display of that image to the
user are registered with the server display. That is,
irrespective of the change in relative position of the
client device, we can always compute where any po-
sition on the server display appears on the client cam-
era image and the display of that client camera image.
Also, since we can easily compute the inverse trans-
formation, we can choose any position on the client
camera image, such as the centre or one of the image
corners, and determine the corresponding position on
the server display. We call the concept of maintaining
the correspondencebetween client and server displays
maintaining display registration. The fact that the dis-
plays are registered enables a large range of possible
interactions and data exchanges between client and
server devices. It is envisaged that the user may con-
trol this interaction through a variety of modes, which
are effectively different contexts in which to interpret
registered display operations.
3 REGISTRATION METHODS
For a planar client image plane and a planar server
display systems, we need to find a plane-to-plane
mapping that allows us to compute the display regis-
tration. This mapping encodes the (idealised) imaging
process of the camera (intrinsic parameters) and the
six degree-of-freedom pose of the client image plane
relative to the server display (extrinsic parameters). It
is well-known that this transformation, called a planar
homography, can be represented by a 3x3 matrix, H,
such that λx
i
= HX
i
, where X
i
is a point on the server
display, x
i
is the corresponding point in the client im-
age and λ is a constant. The matrix H, is defined up to
a scale factor and hence has eight degrees of freedom.
Thus it can be estimated by standard linear methods if
four corresponding points are known across the client
image and server display, with the constraint that no
three are collinear. In this case we haveeight indepen-
dent constraints and H is fully defined (up to scale).
More corresponding points can yield a more accurate
estimate of H, using some variant of a least-squares
technique. Various estimation techniques for H are
detailed by Hartley and Zisserman (Hartley and Zis-
serman, 2004).
The question now arises: how to we find four or
more corresponding points across the server display
and client image of that display? This problem can be
divided into two categories: (i) marker-based and (ii)
natural (markerless).
In marker-based display registration, the server is
required to maintain a dynamic display of four dis-
tinctively coloured reference targets, no three if which
are collinear, which can easily be detected and seg-
mented by the client. Given that the position of these
can be detected in the client, these positions can be
transmitted to the server, which knows where the tar-
gets were displayed on the server display. A planar
homography estimation method can then be applied
to register the displays without any prior calibration
of the camera. Note that, since the homography trans-
formation between the server display and client dis-
play is known when the displays are registered, it is
possible to change the markers in the server display,
such that the shape, size and position of the markers
is constant in the client image irrespective of camera
viewing pose. This leads to more reliable detection
of the markers, since they do not become too small
to detect as the client camera moves away from the
server display.
In natural display registration, no dynamically
controlled markers are used to aid registration (ho-
mography computation). Registration is achieved by
matching the client image to the unmodified server
display (although one can choose to use textured
backgrounds and windows) and this may be achieved
using one of several techniques in the computer vi-
sion and pattern recognition literature. Perhaps the
simplest approach is to use corner extraction (Harris
and Stephens, 1988), (Smith and Brady, 1995) fol-
VISAPP 2008 - International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications
448
lowed by matching across the two views. The ob-
vious difficulty is solving the correspondence prob-
lem: which corners in the server display match the
corners in the client image? The spatial arrange-
ment of corners may be used as a matching con-
straint, for example, five corners in a general po-
sition provide a pair of cross-ratio invariants (Sin-
clair and Blake, 1996), although cross-ratio compu-
tation is noise sensitive. Rather than using the spa-
tial arrangement of corners, one can compute specific
features in the image that are distinctive and invari-
ant to the imaging process. Several researchers have
formulated invariant features, such as Schmid and
Mohr’s (Schmid and Mohr, 1997) rotationally sym-
metric Gaussian derivatives and Baumberg’s (Baum-
berg, 2000) second moment matrix, which gives in-
variance to affine transforms. Lowe’s scale invariant
feature transform (SIFT), is perhaps the most success-
ful of these (Lowe, 2004). SIFT features are invari-
ant to similarity transforms (translation, rotation and
scale changes). Although this technique also provides
some robustness to affine transforms, large non-affine
distortions (caused by large pan and tilt rotations of
the client) are likely to cause the system to loose track.
4 A PROTOTYPE SYSTEM
We have implemented a working prototype by render-
ing distinct markers on the desktop display and track-
ing their position as seen by a smartphone with an
integrated camera, as shown in figure 3.
The first stage was to choose a suitable dynamic
target pattern. We have elected to use four squares of
a distinctive green colour. Note that an image of the
four squares has a rotational ambiguity and so, on ini-
tialisation of the system, it is necessary to display a
target that is not rotationally symmetric. We used one
square with a hollowed out centre to break this sym-
metry and give us an unambiguous orientation. Fur-
thermore, by alternating between “full squares” and
“hollowed out squares” in subsequent frames, we are
able to deal with the time lag between image capture
and processing on the client side and the display of
the updated target position on the server screen, which
would otherwise cause instability in the tracking pro-
cess.
The computation of the planar homography be-
tween the actual marker positions on the desktop dis-
play, and their coordinates in the image seen by the
handset, allows the fast and highly accurate calcula-
tion of the mapping between pixels on the handset
and the desktop, thereby facilitating a range of appli-
cations.
The basic sequence of events for the system oper-
ation is as follows:
The client and server establish a communication
channel over a Bluetooth link.
The initialisation process starts with the server
moving the special initialisation target systemat-
ically around the server screen, starting from the
centre and working outwards towards the screen
edges. The user starts by aiming the camera ap-
proximately towards the centre of the server dis-
play.
When the client is able to acquire the target, the
2D image positions of the four centres of the tar-
get squares (eight values) in the target are trans-
mitted to the server. The server then associates the
corresponding four display positions with these
target positions and computes the plane-to-plane
homography mapping between the two displays.
The server then computes the corresponding
server display positions for the corners of the
markers in the client image. This indicates how
the target pattern should appear in the server dis-
play, for the pattern to remain constant in appear-
ance on the client display.
For further cycles of operation, the four target cen-
tres are switched between “filled” and “hollow”so
that the time lag between server display of target
and client computation of target pose can be de-
termined.
We now explain the target segmentation and ac-
quisition in more detail
4.1 Target Segmentation and
Acquisition
The target colour that is detected on the client is mod-
elled using RG-chromaticity colour space. In this
space the red and green colour components are nor-
malised by dividing by intensity, which is the sum
of the RGB components. This gives some immu-
nity to intensity variations, but there are more sophis-
ticated approaches to colour normalisation, such as
those suggested by Alexander (Alexander, 1999). In
our approach the RG-plane in colour space is divided
into bins and the image of the targets is selected man-
ually. All of the manually selected pixels populate
these bins to give a colour model as a histogram in
RG-space. We can thus determine whether a pixel
falls within the modelled colour space and classify it
as either belonging to the target or not. The simple
approach that we use is to find the mean pixel po-
sition for the segmented pixels and divide the image
DISPLAY REGISTRATION FOR DEVICE INTERACTION - A Proof of Principle Prototype
449
into four (not necessarily equal) segments in direc-
tions associated with tracked orientation of the target.
The mean positions in these segmented regions corre-
spond to the four centres of the square targets, which
is the information that we require.
5 EVALUATION
Usability testing has been performed using the talk-
aloud protocol, in which participants describe their
observations, thoughts and actions as they complete
specific tasks. Four participants were asked to each
complete two tasks. Both tasks used the display reg-
istration system deployed on a PC with a 17” LCD
display communicatingwith a smartphone implemen-
tation of the client software over Bluetooth. An image
of a user performing these tasks is shown in figure 3,
note that the segmented targets on the client smart-
phone are highlighted in red.
The first task involved a specially-written photo
montage demonstration application, in which three
digital photographs were laid out in a particular start-
ing position, as in figure 4. The users were asked to
rearrange the photos to resemble a second configu-
ration with different positions, orientations and scale
(as shown in figure 5) using the display registration
system. A target was drawn on the PC display at the
centre of the smartphones camera view. By depress-
ing a trigger button on the smartphone, the user was
able to manipulate the targeted image. The images
could be moved by translating the phone parallel to
the display, rotated them by rotating the phone paral-
lel to the display, and scaled by translating the phone
towards or away from the display.
The second task used the system to replicate a spe-
cific outline drawing of a house, as shown in figure 6,
within the Microsoft Paint application. The software
set-up provided the correct brush size and colour, and
the participants were only required to make their own
brush strokes using the smartphone. An example out-
put from one of the participants is shown in figure 7.
In our tests, our client device was a Siemens
SX1 smartphone, with a series 60 phone proces-
sor (130MHz TI OMAP 310), running Symbian
OS V6.1. The system specifications were: frame
rate, 8 Hz; camera field of view, 30; maximum
phone movement, 0.3m/s at 0.45m from a 17”
(0.34m 0.27m) display; target re-acquisition time,
2-3 seconds. AVI videos of the four users per-
forming these two tasks can be found online at
http://irgen.ncl.ac.uk/data/temp/displayreg/TaskVideos/.
Here we summarize the observations of usability
problems highlighted by the participants in the talk-
aloud evaluation described above. In performing the
first task, all four participants appeared to compre-
hend the basic principal of the system with only the
briefest explanation of how the task should be per-
formed. In each trial, transient registration errors
while the user was performing a manipulation tended
to cause temporary changes in the manipulated im-
ages position, rotation or scale, which participants
generally found distracting. Two participants noted
that the direction for scale may not be obvious (it was
set up so dragging back from the image would make it
larger), and that scaling was more difficult than trans-
lating or rotating in general. Three of the four par-
ticipants satisfactorily completed the task of reposi-
tioning the images from figure 4 to 5. One had prob-
lems that were due to not keeping the mobile phone
aimed at the screen itself and this appeared to be be-
cause they were observing the PC screen rather than
the smartphone itself. In general, it was clear that
whenever a transient registration error temporarily af-
fected the plotted cursor point, the final brush strokes
would also be affected, further distracting the user.
Some disapproving comments on the aesthetics of the
green markers were made, and that the relatively slow
end-to-end communication speed affected the maxi-
mum allowable velocity of the smartphone. When-
ever the marker set could not be found (usually due to
the phone not being correctly pointed at a screen), the
system would timeout and successfully reacquire the
marker positions.
Figure 3: User tests.
6 CONCLUSIONS
We have proposed a new technique for device inter-
action, which relies on the registration of the display
on one device, with an image of that display, captured
on another device. This type of interaction opens up
a range of new possibilities, in particular those in-
VISAPP 2008 - International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications
450
Figure 4: Start position of images on server display.
Figure 5: Target position of images on server display.
Figure 6: Outline of a template on the server display.
volved with interacting with public displays, using
hand-held devices such as smartphones and PDAs.
We have build a prototype of such a system which
uses coloured markers on the server screen to enable
a simple and reliable registration process. We have
used this system for translating, rotating and scaling
images on a PC screen and for simple drawing appli-
cations. Through user evaluations, we have proved
that the technique works in principle although fur-
ther work is required to develop the system for faster
frame rates, more robust tracking and to implement a
markerless registration process, which would provide
a better user experience.
Figure 7: Output of the client motion.
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