Towards Industrial IoT-AR Systems using Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation

Augmented Reality (AR) is known to enhance user experience, however, it remains under-adopted in industry. We present an AR interaction system improving human-machine coordination in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 applications including manufacturing and assembly, maintenance and safety, and other highly-interactive functions. A driver of slow adoption is the computational complexity and inaccuracy in localization and rendering digital content. AR systems may render digital content close to the associated physical objects, but traditional object recognition and localization modules perform poorly when tracking texture-less objects and complex shapes, presenting a need for robust and efficient digital content rendering techniques. We propose a method of improving IoT-AR by integrating Deep Learning with AR to increase accuracy and robustness of the target object localization module, taking both color and depth images as input and outputting the target's pose parameters. Quantitative and qualitative experiments prove this system's efficacy and show potential for fusing these emerging technologies in real-world applications.