Resolving occlusion in augmented reality: a contour based approach without 3D reconstruction

We present a new approach for resolving occlusions in augmented reality. The main interest is that it does not require 3D reconstruction of the considered scene. Our idea is to use a contour based approach and to label each contour point as being ''behind'' or ''in front of'', depending on whether it is in front of or behind the virtual object. This labeling step only requires that the contours can be tracked from frame to frame. A proximity graph is then built in order to group the contours that belong to the same occluding object. Finally, we use some kind of active contours to accurately recover the mask of the occluding object.