Real time detection and tracking of printed maps based on road structure

This paper presents a method to detect and track a paper map and overlay virtual data over it. First, we take a picture of the map and identify the road colors using our road area extraction method. Using the color information we can then extract in real time the roads from a video and use the position of the intersections to identify the map from a database without any further user input. The main issue is to get reliable intersection positions in real time even though the map can contain a lot of overlapping data. Finally, using the location of the intersections we can track and augment the map with virtual information. Our method enables the real time matching, 3D tracking and augmentation of a paper map based on a database that can contain several thousands of intersections coordinates.