Recent Patents in Signal Processing (September 2012) - Augmented Reality

For the September 2012 edition, we focus on recent patents in augmented reality. The selection below includes patents issued in the recent past on various applications of augmented reality, including enhancing video conferencing, providing graphical overlays on head-up displays in automobiles, improving night vision, retrieving rich information about images taken by a smartphone camera and more.

US 8,243,099, "Method and system for haptic interaction in augmented reality", by J. Ryu, B.-C. Lee, S. -U. Hwang, H. Park and Y. -G. Lee, filed 3 February 2009, issued 14 August 2012, assigned to Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (Gwangju, Korea).

US 8,180,396, "User augmented reality for camera-enabled mobile devices", by A. Athsani and C. Kalaboukis, filed 18 October 2007, issued 15 May 2012, assigned to Yahoo! Inc. (San Jose, CA).

US 7,957,584, "Fast object detection for augmented reality systems", by H. Najafi and Y. Genc, filed 4 March 2010, issued 7 June 2011, assigned to Siemens Corporation (Iselin, NJ) .

US 8,228,368, "Augmented stereoscopic visualization for a surgical robot using a captured fluorescence image and captured stereoscopic visible images", by W. Zhao, C. Mohr, C. Hasser, B. Hoffman, J. Stern and T. Zhao, filed 30 June 2008, issued 24 July 2012, assigned to Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA).

US 8,098,171, "Traffic visibility in poor viewing conditions on full windshield head-up display", by J. Szczerba, T. Seder and D. Cui, filed 28 December 2010, issued 17 January 2012, assigned to GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Detroit, MI).

US 8,164,543, "Night vision on full windshield head-up display", by T. Seder and J. Szczerba, filed 18 May 2009, issued 24 April 2012, assigned to GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Detroit, MI) .

US 8,102,601, "Head up display device for vehicle", by T. Sasaki and H. Nakane, filed 23 March 2011, issued 24 January 2012, assigned to Denso Corporation (Kariya, JP).

US 8,189,964, "Matching an approximately located query image against a reference image set", by J. Flynn, U. Buddemeier, H. Stewenius, H. Neven, F. Brucher and H. Adam, filed 7 December 2009, issued 29 May 2012, assigned to Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA) .

US 8,086,066, "Digitally-generated lighting for video conferencing applications", by A. Basso, E. Cosatto, D. Gibbon, H. Graf and S. Liu, filed 8 September 2010, issued 27 December 2011, assigned to AT&T Intellectual Property II, L.P. (Atlanta, GA).

If you have an interesting patent to share when we next feature patents on augmented reality, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).