3D Path prediction of moving objects in a video-augmented indoor virtual environment

Augmented virtual environments (AVE) combine real-time videos with 3D scenes in a Digital Earth System or 3D GIS to present dynamic information and a virtual scene simultaneously. AVE can provide solutions for continuous tracking of moving objects, camera scheduling, and path planning in the real world. This paper proposes a novel approach for 3D path prediction of moving objects in a video-augmented indoor virtual environment. The study includes 3D motion analysis of moving objects, multi-path prediction, hierarchical visualization, and path-based multi-camera scheduling. The results show that these methods can give a closed-loop process of 3D path prediction and continuous tracking of moving objects in an AVE. The path analysis algorithms proved accurate and time-efficient, costing less than 1.3 ms to get the optimal path. The experiment ran a 3D scene containing 295,000 triangles at around 35 frames per second on a laptop with 1 GB of graphics card memory, which means the performance of the proposed methods is good enough to maintain high rendering efficiency for a video-augmented indoor virtual scene.