Augmented reality for visitors of cultural heritage sites

ARCHEOGUIDE (Augmented Reality-based Cultural Heritage On-site GUIDE) is the acronym of a project, funded by the EU IST framework (IST-1999-11306), and pursued by a consortium of European organizations. The system allows the user/visitor to experience a Virtual Reality world featuring computer-generated 3D reconstructions of ruined sites without isolating him from the "real world". The key feature of the system is the position and orientation tracking technique used in determining the user's viewpoint. This is an image registration technique based on phase correlation. This paper presents the technique in detail and gives practical examples of the application of the technique in the ARCHEOGUIDE system. In particular, it describes how calibrated reference images may be matched to live video by image transformation to the Fourier domain and phase calculation for translation, rotation, and scaling operations