A work area visualization by multi-view camera-based diminished reality

Hand-held tools are indispensable for efficient manual working in fields ranging from woodworking to surgery. In this paper, we present a diminished reality (DR) method to visualize areas occluded by hands and tools in various hand-working scenarios. We propose a redesigned existing arbitrary viewpoint image generation method for DR applications as a core DR background rendering to recover views without undesirable objects. We conducted quantitative and qualitative experiments using real data to validate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results showed that our method runs in real-time (40.1 fps) and surpasses conventional methods (including image inpainting-based and geometry-based approaches) in terms of image similarity measures.