3-D Tracking of shoes for Virtual Mirror applications

In this paper, augmented reality techniques are used in order to create a virtual mirror for the real-time visualization of customized sports shoes. Similar to looking into a mirror when trying on new shoes in a shop, we create the same impression but for virtual shoes that the customer can design individually. For that purpose, we replace the real mirror by a large display that shows the mirrored input of a camera capturing the legs and shoes of a person. 3-D tracking of both feet and exchanging the real shoes by computer graphics models gives the impression of actually wearing the virtual shoes. The 3-D motion tracker presented in this paper, exploits mainly silhouette information to achieve robust estimates for both shoes from a single camera view. The use of a hierarchical approach in an image pyramid enables real-time estimation at frame rates of more than 30 frames per second.