Detecting Good Surface for Improvisatory Visual Projection

Abstract

A projector is usually coupled with a dedicated projection surface to properly display visual information. This prevents the application of projection in places where a dedicated projection surface is not readily available. This paper presents a method for automatically detecting a good surface in a daily living and working space to support improvisatory projection without a pre-installed projection surface. Our method uses a projector-camera system that scans an environment and evaluates the quality of the environment surface for visual projection in two steps. Our method first excludes non-planar or highly-textured surface through epipolar geometry analysis and texture analysis. For a surface that passes the first test, our method further evaluates its quality for visual projection by quickly projecting the sampled projection content onto the surface and measuring the quality of the projected visual content. Our experiment shows that our method can reliably identify a good surface in a daily environment for high-quality visual projection.