PolarTrack: Optical outside-indevicetracking that exploits displaypolarization

Roman Rädle, Hans Christian Jetter, Jonathan Fischer, Inti Gabriel, Clemens N. Klokmose, Harald Reiterer, Christian Holz

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

PolarTrack is a novel camera-based approach to detecting and tracking mobile devices inside the capture volume. In Po-larTrack, a polarization filter continuously rotates in front of an off-the-shelf color camera, which causes the displays of observed devices to periodically blink in the camera feed. The periodic blinking results from the physical characteristics of current displays, which shine polarized light either through an LC overlay to produce images or through a polarizer to reduce light reflections on OLED displays. PolarTrack runs a simple detection algorithm on the camera feed to segment displays and track their locations and orientations, which makes PolarTrack particularly suitable as a tracking system for cross-device interaction with mobile devices. Our evaluation of PolarTrack's tracking quality and comparison with state-of-the-art camera-based multi-device tracking showed a better tracking accuracyand precision with similar tracking reliability. PolarTrack works as standalone multi-device tracking but is also compatible with existing camera-based tracking systems and can complement them to compensate for their limitations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI 2018 - Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems : Engage with CHI
Number of pages9
Volume2018-April
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date20 Apr 2018
Article number497
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356206, 9781450356213
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Apr 2018
Event2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 21 Apr 201826 Apr 2018

Conference

Conference2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period21/04/201826/04/2018
SponsorACM SIGCHI

Keywords

  • Cross-device
  • Display polarization
  • Multi-device
  • Spatial interaction
  • Tracking technology

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