Mobile Smartphone-based Augmented Reality for Industry Remote Monitoring and Maintenance

Currently, VR and AR headsets are becoming widespread. In addition to entertainment purposes, these technologies are increasingly being used in education, science, medicine, and engineering. The remote maintenance monitoring technologies make it possible to significantly expand the possibilities of using services for remote maintenance and repair complex technical systems by highly qualified specialists. However, the problems of implementing such systems in a wide range of tasks are complicated by the presence of a wide variety of solutions of this kind and the high price of such models. In this paper, we investigate a new smartphone-based augmented reality device for industrial tasks. The article describes augmented reality glasses based on a mobile phone (system "DAR"), which combines the functions of VR and AR technologies and a low cost of the final product. The proposed solution combines a helmet with a smartphone, which transmits information about the surrounding space and connects the augmented reality elements built on this image. Information about the surrounding space comes to the smartphone screen from stereo cameras equipped with autofocus. Images captured in such a system suffer from low contrast and faint color. We present a new image enhancement algorithm based on multi-scale block-rooting processing. This solution makes it possible to expand AR technology scope for remote maintenance of complex technical systems by highly qualified specialists at remote sites since using a smartphone and a DAR headset will be sufficient. Some experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm on the real and synthesized image datasets.