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Covering photo-realistic properties of outdoor components with the effects of sky color in mixed reality

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Abstract

Outdoor rendering is an attractive topic in computer graphics. In this paper our main concern is to reveal the interaction between sky color and virtual objects in Mixed Reality environments. Although registration and tracking are two of the main issues in building effective Augmented Reality (AR) systems the creation of more realistic virtual objects indistinguishable from their real-world counterparts is our target which is currently the ultimate goal in AR. Two classes of sky color generation are employed to reveal the outdoor-element interaction. Virtual Sky Modelling (VSM) based on the Perez Model is capable of generating the sky color in a specific location, date and time. The second technique is to generate a virtual model based on the real image of the sky which is called in this paper Real Sky Modelling (RSM). Subsequently, preprocessing of the sky color bleeding is based on the radiosity technique to give the sky color effect to the virtual objects as well as the real ones. Through designing a test AR set-up and applying software and hardware the goal of a robust generation of realistic virtual objects with effect of sky color is achieved.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Vot. J13000.7282.4F085 FRGS grant at the UTMVicubeLab, Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

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Correspondence to Hoshang Kolivand.

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Kolivand, H., Sunar, M.S. Covering photo-realistic properties of outdoor components with the effects of sky color in mixed reality. Multimed Tools Appl 72, 2143–2162 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1494-9

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