Measurement of absolute latency for video see through augmented reality

TLDR: A stable and comparable way of estimating the latency in a video see through AR system by encoding the time in the image and decoding the time after camera feedback, and proposing to visualize the measurements in a histogram.

Abstract: Latency is a key property of video see through AR systems since users' performance is strongly related to it. However, there is no standard way of latency measurement of an AR system in the literature. We have created a stable and comparable way of estimating the latency in a video see through AR system. The latency is estimated by encoding the time in the image and decoding the time after camera feedback. We have encoded the time as a translation of a circle in the image. The cross ratio has been used as an image feature that is preserved in a projective transformation. The encoding allows for a simple but accurate way of decoding. We show that this way of encoding has an adequate accuracy for latency measurements. As the method allows for a series of automatic measurements we propose to visualize the measurements in a histogram. This histogram reveals meaningful information about the system other than the mean value and standard deviation of the latency. The method has been tested on four different AR systems that use different camera technology, resolution and frame rates.