Diminished Reality (DR) has been considered as a sub-technology of Mixed and Augmented Reality (AR/MR). While AR/MR means technologies that add and/or overlay visual information onto images of real scene for providing users to enhance their visual experiences with the added/overlaid information, DR aims the similar enhanced visual experiences by deleting visual information from the images of real scene. Adding and deleting visual information might be considered as same technical issues, but they are actually totally different. In DR, visual information that is hidden by the deleted object should be recovered for filling into the deleted area. This recovery of the hidden area is not required for general adding/overlaying based AR/MR, but should be one of the typical issues for achieving DR. Camera pose estimation and tracking is a typical issue in AR/MR, but the condition of the scene and required performance for DR are not always the same as AR/MR. For example, the object to be diminished/removed should be detected and tracked while the camera is freely moving for DR.

In this tutorial, challenging technical issues for DR are addressed, such as recovery of hidden area, detecting and tracking the object to be removed/diminished, tracking camera poses, illumination matching and re-lighting, etc. In addition to those technical issues for DR, a survey of applications of DR, expected futures with DR, and human factors of DR are also presented.

Schedule

• 9:15 - 9:30 Opening (15 min)
• 9:30 - 11:00 Diminished Reality: History, New Definition, and Recent Progress
  Speaker: Shohei Mori (Ritsumeikan University)
• 11:15 - 12:00 Diminished Reality as Specialized View Synthesis from Multi-Camera Video Capture
  Speaker: Hideo Saito (Keio University)
• 12:00 - 12:15 Closing (15 min)

Organizers Background

Prof. Hideo Saito received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Keio University, Japan, in 1992. Since then, he has been on the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University. In 1997 to 1999, he had joined into Virtualized Reality Project in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting researcher. Since 2006, he has been a full Professor of Department of Information and Computer Science, Keio University. He served as program co-chair of ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) 2008 and 2009. Now he is a steering committee member of ISMAR. He also served as an Area Chair of ACCV (Asian Conference on Computer Vision) in 2009, 2010, and 2012, and now is a Program Co-Chair for ACCV2014. His research interests include computer vision, mixed reality, virtual reality, and 3D video analysis and synthesis.

Prof. Hideyuki Tamura received B.Eng and the doctorate degrees both in electrical engineering from Kyoto University, Japan. His professional career starting in 1972 includes a Senior Research Official at the Electrotechnical Laboratory, MITI, Japan, the Director of Media Technology Laboratory, Canon Inc., and a member of the executive board of Mixed Reality Systems Laboratory Inc. In 2003, he joined Ritsumeikan University, where he is now an Eminent Professor, Research Organization of Science and Technology.

His research interest and major achievements are in the areas of pictorial pattern recognition, digital image processing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and multimedia systems. His most prominent work is that he planned and conducted the Key-Technology Research Project on Mixed Reality in Japan from 1997 to 2001. He organized the Special Interest Group on Mixed Reality, the Virtual Reality Society of Japan and founded the basic body of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR). Now he is an emeritus member of the ISMAR Steering Committee.

Prof. Tamura served on the executive boards of several academic societies in Japan and received several awards from such societies as IEICE and IPSJ. He is (co)author and (co)editor of ten books, all in the field of computer vision, graphics, and multimedia, including "Mixed Reality -- Merging Real and Virtual Worlds" (Ohmsha & Springer, 1999).

Speaker Background

Shohei Mori received the B.E. degree in computer science and the M.E. degree in science and engineering from Ritsumeikan University, Japan, in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Now he is a Ph.D. student at Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, and a Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC-1) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His research interests include diminished reality, mixed reality, and stereography.